


A Violent Heart

by PastelWonder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi - Fandom, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bedtime Stories, Dark!Kylo, Dubious Consent, Elevator Sex, Error 404: Ben Solo not found, Eventual Happy Ending, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Forced Marriage, Fuck a Slow Burn, Jedi and Sith Lore, Shower Sex, Space Opera, Try: Raging Forest Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-04-20 18:15:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 35
Words: 68,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14266785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: “Who gives this woman to be married to his Majesty, the Supreme Leader of the First Order?”"How dare you, Benjamin Solo," General Organa hissed. Her whole body was heaving, she was breathless with grief. "My son is dead.""Parting words I shall cherish forever, Mother."





	1. Every Girl's Crazy 'bout a Sharp-Dressed Sith

“My Lord, the crew is preparing for atmospheric entry. We land in twelve minutes, _precisely_.”

“Good,” he murmured distractedly. He was staring into his dressing room mirror, concentrating on where the clasp of his cloak was tangled on the filigreed button of his double-breasted uniform coat.

“Son of a porg fucker-”

A droid skimmed forward. “My Liege, may I-”

“No.” With his teeth, Ren wrenched the quilted leather glove off of his hand. Too thick to be practical, these gloves were designed for pageantry, not utility.

Exactly as the occasion called for.

_Ah. Success._

With the clasp finally righted, he cast a critical eye over his entire ensemble.

Today he was dressed in full military regalia. His First Order’s military insignia shone like a diamond on his black satin sash; his boots were so impeccably polished they reflected the light. His hair was slicked back, the cosmetology-bot  having surgically applied clear petroleum gel until the perfect hold-to-sheen ratio was achieved.

He worked his hand back inside the heavy leather glove and turned himself left. Then right. Then left again.

_Powerful. Absolute._

_Dangerous._

His chin lifted in triumph.

“This will do."

The attendent droids milling anxiously around the perimeter of the room let out a collective blip of relief.

“Simply resplendent, Your Eminence,” their chorus of mechanical simpers overlapped on another's, “The very portrait of malevolent majesty, Most Supreme One. Our lowly processors are unworthy to parse your magnificence-”

Ren raised his hand. “Enough. Leave me, all of you.”

General Hux, apparently, had not taken _all of you_ to include himself.

“Do you really intend to go through with this?” he sniffed. “ _Your Majesty_.”

Ignoring him summarily, Ren took his chance for one final preening, smoothing the faint creases in his uniform trousers... straightening his saber hilt…

Satisfied at last, he moved to the compartment of his dressing room that held his crowning jewel.

His mask.

The familiar weight pressing in on all sides of his skull relieved some of the roiling in his gut. As its locking mechanism engaged with a vaporous hiss, he turned toward the General.

Though Hux had seen his Supreme Leader in all his glorious menace at least half a hundred times, his mind projected terror anew, as if it were the very first.

Ren took it as the highest of compliments.

“Prepare my entourage.” His voice came in a deep, metallic distortion through the speech grate. "My destiny awaits."

The General bowed deeply - “My Lord” - and clipped elegantly from the room, though not before Ren caught the trailing thought, _-almost pity the poor girl._

Behind his mask, he smiled. A deviant smirk that cinched the scarred half of his face.

Nothing, not even Hux’s misplaced condolences, could spoil this most momentous occasion.

His wedding day.


	2. A Nice Day for a White Wedding

They exited the _Finalizer_ down the main ramp, a cavalcade of himself, his general and his first platoon captain, flanked by flag bearers hoisting the banner of the First Order and followed by six rows of twelve officers in full ceremonial regalia. A black parody of the traditional Alderaanian wedding pageant, it was as much a nettle at his mother as it was a sincere exhibition of esteem for his betrothed.

Ren of Jakku. Daughter of filthy junk traders. Heiress to nothing.

Queen of his heart.

And soon, of the Galaxy.

She stood near the base of the ramp, her gangly limbs arranged in an antagonistic stance. Teeth bared, eyes glinting like the sharpened tips of poison darts. Such a plain, underwhelming creature with an underfed, almost boyish appearance.

And absolutely beguiling.

At her side, the groom’s mother, pale-faced and quivering with fury, looked as if she might retch at any moment.

Fifty paces behind them - the distance stipulated in their prenuptial decree - Rey's bridal party looked and sounded more like a gaggle of mourners than a proper entourage.

FN-2187 was in the throes of a particularly histrionic display, fallen on his knees and howling and clawing at air so that his little companion had to put all her strength into restraining him.

The pilot stood beside him, his hands balled into fists, his droid sparking and sputtering by his heels like a rabid lunatic lapdog.

The rest wailed and gnashed their teeth.

Behind the speech grate, the corner of Ren’s mouth quirked in irritation.

_Melodramatic cowards._

His march ended just short of on top of Rey. This close to her, he could see the trails of clean skin her tears had made through the dust and grime on her lovely face, and the tremor around her hateful snarl. Her indignation crackled through her aura like static building before an electrical storm.

It was painfully arousing.

"Hello, Rey," his words poured like sand through the speech grate.

She hocked and spat.

The wad splatted onto his visor, leaving an irksome smear as he wiped it.

"Murderous snake!"

"I've missed you too, beloved-"

The General took their exchange as his cue. His grand herald was louder than a trumpet’s.

“Who gives this woman to be married to His Majesty, the Supreme Leader of the First Order?”

“How dare you, Benjamin Solo,” General Organa, Princess Leia, _Mother_ , hissed through clenched teeth. She clung onto Rey's arm for dear life, her whole body heaving, breathless with grief and indignation. “How _dare_ you.”

Ren inclined his head. “Mother.”

"General Organa," Hux bowed with a sanctimonious flourish that was as sincere as it was ludicrous.

Not at all to Ren's surprise. In matters of pomp and august, the General was an ardent purist.

“You may present the bride,” he indicated Ren's outstretched palm.

The women dragged themselves forward as someone in the bridal party wailed desperately, “Rey, no!”

Ren suppressed a sigh.

With a glare that set his teeth on edge and sparked shame inside his gut, his mother placed Rey’s thin, trembling hand into his richly gloved one.

“My son is dead,” she told him.

“Parting words I will cherish forever, Mother.”

Before she could retort - or revolt - he swept Rey behind him. With a thunderous _clap,_ the boots of six dozen men moved in unison on the corrugated ramp, ensconcing her in his parade and sealing her off from her allies.

More obnoxious blubbering from the bridal party, accompanied by a final, warbled plea from his mother.

“Ben, _please,_ she’s only a child-”

“The cease-fire begins now, as stated in the prenuptial decree. All rebel fighters are granted conditional amnesty on the basis of their compliance with the terms set forth therein. Any breach of these terms, any attempt to resist the First Order, or to rescue her Majesty the Queen, will constitute the immediate termination of amnesty status, and the total extermination of all rebel fighters.”

He stepped in close, so that she had to crane her neck to see the mask where her son's face had once been.

“Come for her, and I will kill you all, and make her watch. You have my word.”

Behind him, the _Finalizer's_ engines roared to life, igniting the blue flame of its launching boosters. Dust from this filthy, barren planet whirled around them.

"Good bye, Mother." He knew she could hear his mocking smile. "And may The Force be with you."

For the last time, he turned his back on the past.

_Kill it, if you have to._

“Eternal blessings of good fortune to you all,” Hux cawed out from the rising ramp. “On this happiest of days!”


	3. He Who Kills with His Gun Has Forgotten the Face of His Father

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One month prior...

“How could you do it?”

She was on her knees, a crumpled heap on the floor of the _Falcon_. 

He couldn't pretend that her grief wasn’t beautiful.

That everything, everything about her wasn’t beautiful.

“All those people… Why?”

“My laws were clear, they knew the consequences for harboring rebels. I gave them time-”

“They were innocent people! Women… a-and children, and you… _God_.” A sob overtook her. She doubled-over under its weight, the back of her slender hand pressed against her open mouth.

“I gave them time,” he repeated quietly.

_Who are you trying to convince? Her?_

_Or yourself?_

He needed to extinguish the doubt her words sparked inside his gut, so he swamped it with anger.

“It’s cowardice,” he hissed, “to hide among women and children. Is that the cause you want to fight for – a coward’s cause?”

Her eyes looked straight into his. Those big, luminous eyes. “Better a coward than a monster.”

He crouched down in front of her.

“You still don’t understand. The blood of those villagers is on the hands of the Resistance-”

Her mouth opened, he heard her take a breath. He held up one gloved finger and pressed it to her lips.

He felt her soft startle all the way to his cock.

“But more than that, it’s on yours.”

There were tears in her lashes. They trembled and fell, chasing one another down her cheeks and disappearing into her hair in a way that made him ache.

“You can end all of it.” His voice was a deep, quiet murmur.  He cupped her face. “Their suffering, your loneliness – all of it.”

She closed her eyes.

The tears that still clung onto her lashes dripped down like rain rolling off the leaves of the Kashyykian forest. They slickened her skin under his glove, and pooled in the leather creases between his knuckles.

A shadow passed over his soul.

_I love her._

Her eyes opened to meet his again. Only this time, they were tearless, and full of hate.

He wasn’t afraid.

Hatred had been the beginning of his understanding.

It would be the beginning of hers, too.

“I’ll give you another month, because I am generous.”

“Because you’re _generous_ \- ”

“Yes.” He withdrew gently. “One month. That’s all.”

“And then what?”

He stood. Her tears were still on his hand, in the spaces between his fingers. He flexed, and they ran like small black rivers over the palm of his glove.

“Then?” His smirk pursed the scarred half of his face. “Well then I start killing what you really love.”

Fear - that was the last emotion in her eyes before the bond closed and he was alone again in the _Finalizer_ ’s abandoned hanger, her tears in his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your kudos and comments are always appreciated.


	4. Going to the Chapel and We're Gonna Get Married

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to witness the sacred union of this man and this woman in holy matrimony-”

Rey snorted.

Loudly.

The General, wearing his most aggrieved expression yet, stumbled over his litany.

For what felt like the billionth time, Ren warned her below his breath. “ _Don’t."_

"Or what?" she harrumphed. She hid the trembling in her mouth behind a snarl. "You'll make me marry you twice?"

Only half an hour into their nuptials, and he was seriously considering an annulment.

Starting with a staged sneeze that promptly extinguished the flame of their unity candle, followed by a halting ceremony punctuated by random outbursts of, “Murderous snake!”, topped only by her flat-out refusal to recite her vows, letting the General's meaningful pauses hang painfully in the air and acknowledging her part only at the end with a spitefully spat-out, " _Whatever_ ".

He’d had it up to the hilt with her antics.

“Take. Control. Of your. Emotions-”

"My emotions!" she shriek-whispered. A tear slipped down her cheek. She slapped at it furiously. "On this, the most miserable day of my life? You- you’re a disgrace to your father’s name-”

“My _father’s_ name?” Now it was his turn to snort.

“Your mother's heart is broken; she’ll probably die of grief, if not of the shame of having such a lecherous beast for a son-”

“At last we’ve diverged from murderous snake-”

“Murderous snake!” she bellowed.

“You’re Supreme Excellence!” General Hux looked like he was going into prudent shock. “Forgive me, but it is time to exchange the rings.”

Reaching into his breast pocket, Ren muttered, “Thank God for swift deaths."

She tried maneuvering her hand to evade his grasp as she hissed, “Is that an invitation?”

He caught it with an impressive degree of gentleness. “You’d only embarrass yourself.”

“Give me your saber,” she snapped, “and we’ll see who’s embarrassed-”

He slipped the ring onto her finger with a licentious smirk. “You want me to give you my saber...”

She blanched. “Wha- no, that’s not-“

“YOU MAY NOW KISS THE BRIDE!”

Faster than she could act, he caught her by the mouth.

His kiss wasn’t cruel or punishing, nor was it chaste or beseeching.

It was deep and smoldering.

Like his longing for her.

_Want me. Need me._

_Love me._

His tongue swept into her; she whimpered in a way that went straight to his cock.

One-by-one, he projected images across her mind, like fast-moving storm clouds across the sky.

_You, up on the pulpit, bare breasted. My mouth - everywhere. Your neck, your breasts, your naked sex. My cock, hard, pistoning. Inside you._

Her hands fisted in the sleeves of his coat.

_Faster. I’m fucking you faster. It’s coming, you feel it. You're coming-_

Through the fabric of her gown, his hands found her high, round ass and groped her firmly.

_Come now._

Her body convulsed once, then went slack in his arms.

Their lips peeled apart with an audible _smooch_.

From where he lay collapsed against the impromptu lectern, his holo-processional clutched to his bosom like a periapt against impropriety, the General summoned his final reserve of strength to hail them the hell off his dais.

“With the power vested in me by this great State, I pronounce you husband and wife!"

Rey stayed slumped against him, staring up at him with glassy eyes. Tears trembled in her lashes like a constellation of grief-stricken stars. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

"Shh shh shh. Save your strength, beloved.” Tenderly, he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

"You're going to need it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I say I'd finish in 7 chapters? I... might end up a smidge over. Ok, a lot over. 
> 
> Sorry guys. Space is so fun! Who knew?


	5. Promise Not to Stop When I Say When, She Sang

_"Can't I pee on my own?"_ she'd snapped fiercely.

That was over an hour ago.

_Un-fucking-believable._

“Couldn’t have built a smaller ship, could you, asshole? Oh no, it had to be the biggest fucking ship in the Galaxy,” he waited for the doors to close and the elevator to begin its descent before he began to mutter again.

“How large would you like your ship, Sire?”

“How about large enough to lose my wife?”

“Very good, Sire.”

He let out a savage snarl and pummeled the paneling with his fist. “Stupid. Fucking. Cocksucking. Ship-”

 _“North Tower. Floor one-thousand-five-hundred-and-fourteen”_ , a droid’s voice announced.

_Take control of your emotions._

The doors pinged open.

Before he marched out into the corridor, he took a deep, centering breath.

_Take control of your emotions._

_Take control of your emotions._

_Take. Control. Of your-_

_There._

He stopped, closed his eyes, and reached out for her.

_Turn right. Two corridors, turn left._

_She’s there._

He found her with a bottle pressed against her breasts, curled up on a window sill, watching her reflection in the glass. Her bare feet were tucked beneath her, toes peeking out from under the hem of her gown.

The knot around his heart relaxed.

_She’s still here. She hasn’t disappeared._

“Rey.”

She startled and turned. Alcohol sloshed inside the bottle.

“Supreme Leader-” With tremendous effort, she climbed to her feet and saluted him. “Most Malevolent and Majestic Majesty of the- _shit_.”

Her knees buckled.

He caught her just in time.

“You’re drunk,” he observed mildly. “Great. That’s… fucking great.”

“I thought it might help.” She brought the bottle eye-level and watched the amber liquor swirl inside it.

“I don’t think it’s working.” She frowned up at him, squinting. “You’re not dead.”

He snorted, and caught a strong whiff from the bottle’s tapered mouth.

He recognized the scent from his childhood. A scent he’d know anywhere.

Corellian whiskey.

His father’s drink.

“Where did you get this bottle?”

Her brow furrowed. She pressed the back of her hand to her flushed cheek. “I don’t know… someone… gave it to me, I think-”

“Who? Who gave it to you?”

“Ben...” She laid her hand on his chest, over his heart, and looked into his eyes.

Hers were red-rimmed and wet, shining with the cool grey light of dead stars.

He went as still as stone. For every second her eyes searched his, he could feel his heartbeat inside his throat.

“No... not Ben,” her murmur was thick with grief. “You’re him.”

“Who?” His voice sounded deeper, darker and full of gravel. He swallowed. “Who am I?”

Slowly, her eyes traced the lines of his face. “I can’t see it anymore-”

“Tell me,” he persisted softly. “Who do you see?”

“The Light, I can’t see it.” She looked not at his face, but at his aura surrounding it. “It’s all him.”

Her eyes met his again. She blinked. Her tears chased one another down her cheeks, like the fast-fading laughter of little children.

“Darth Vader,” she whispered.

His chest swelled. All the blood in his body rushed towards his cock.

He inhaled deeply.

_Darth Vader._

Her hand reached up, she followed the scar on his face with her fingertips. Her touch was feather-light, but the effect was like a match to the strike, igniting his body and setting his soul on fire.

His hands framed her face.

“I’m so sorry.” More tears streaked down her face. A shower of falling stars. “I should have saved you. Ben, I’m so sorry.”

He kissed her.

She tasted like his father’s whiskey and salt.

His tongue stroked tenderly down the length of hers. Her pale blue aura crackled and shivered.

She mewled helplessly into his mouth.

He drew her plump bottom lip between his as his aura swept up like a vermillion cyclone and swallowed hers whole.

 _I want you,_ his mind whispered inside hers. _Tell me I can have you._

_Say it._

_Say it._

Their lips parted.

“Say it.”

She shook her head.

_“You know I can take whatever I want?”_

The interrogation room.

She played it back to him through their bond.

“Just take it," she whispered.

Her lips trembled. She was sobbing.

Softly.

Raw, naked longing twisted violently at his gut.

“I can’t give you what you want.” Her sweet, beautiful young face cracked with grief. “So just take it. Please-”

“Shh.”

He lifted his hand off her cheek.

The bottle of Corellian whiskey slipped through her fingers and smashed at their feet.

She fainted into his arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, this is where we're headed.
> 
> So if you get triggered easily, or you're not about it, not a problem. 
> 
> Exit the ride to your left.


	6. Follow All the Way to the Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Six months before...

It was nearly a month before the Force connected them again.

The nightmares grew worse, until he saw her in every X-wing his fighters shot out of the stars, and on every battlefield his AT fleet leveled. He bought what precious time he could, softening air strikes and delaying his infantry, while citing tactical reasons to his admirals and allies that made no sense, even from an inexperienced imperial overlord.

General Hux, too cowed to question his authority, spent his manic energy striding the deck and spit-screaming, as Captain Phasma, in her infinite pragmatism, used the lull to submit every soldier in her regiment to a full physical scan and weapons inspection, twice.

By the time he felt the familiar strain in his sternum and heard the telltale ringing in his ears that was the absence of all sound, his entire Empire was on-edge.

Their eyes met, and for that brief moment, he was whole again.

_Rey._

She was dressed in her battle fatigues, a blaster in her hip-holster. A hologram of the structural blueprints to one of his artillery plants turned above the terminal in front of her.

“You’re too late,” she gloried. “Our fighters will be at your armory in less than an hour. Your fleet will never make it in time.”

“Bomb it." He shrugged. "I have a dozen more scattered throughout the Galaxy.”

The smile slipped off her face.

“For every Starfighter you have, I have a hundred. For every soldier, a thousand."

How could he make her understand?

"You’re trying to stem the tide with your fingertips.” He stepped onto the dais, savoring when she didn’t shy away. "It won’t work. You know that."

He ducked his head and caught her eyes. "You have _always_ known that.”

"You're wrong." Emotions swept across her face like the sands over Jakkuvian hardscape. They slipped through the cracks in his soul before he could grasp their meaning.

"You won't win this war." The gentle pity in her eyes cut him to the marrow. "You don't have the Light."

"No," he laid his hand on terminal, next to hers. His eyes studied their fingers – hers small and white, his encased in darkness. "I don't have the Light."

He looked at her. “But you do.”

For several rending seconds, there was no sound in the Galaxy but her soft breathing, and the violent pounding of his heart.

_Take control of your emotions._

He closed his eyes.

Darkness rushed over him like cool water, drowning out his fear. The blades of his shoulders drew down his back, the tension in his face went slack.

From across the Galaxy, Rey felt it – the Force shifting around and through him. He saw it when he opened his eyes.

"You took my hand once," he murmured. "You said I wasn't alone."

He turned up his palm.

And knelt.

"Ben-"

"Rule me, Rey."

The Darkness surged inside him, twisting his longing for her into something virulent and arresting.

He could barely breathe.

"And you will rule the Galaxy.”

The Bond closed before she could answer him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've replaced the other chapter with this pre-cursor to their love-making. My apologies to those who left comments that were deleted :( I absolutely adore reading your humor and encouragement; I wish Archive offered the functionality to save comments after a chapter is deleted. 
> 
> We're still going dark, but with a little more... finesse. Ok, so Pastel got extremely excited to write about light sabers. There are no light sabers in the fandoms I usually write for. I wanted *all* of the light sabers.
> 
> Thanks for hanging out with me while I get my plot - and my head - lined out :)


	7. Maybe There's A God Above, But All I've Ever Learned From Love Was How To Shoot Somebody Who Outdrew Ya

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please stow all personal belongings in the compartment in front of you. Keep your seatbelts fastened and your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.
> 
> Enjoy the ride!

She woke with a start.

He heard the sheets rustle as she shifted. Her body made a soft, pale shadow against the near-perfect dark.

Her thick, dry whisper cracked the silence. “Where am I?”

“You’re in our bed.”

“Oh.” She swallowed audibly. “It’s… dark.”

A sardonic smile pursed the ruined half of his face. “How perceptive of you.”

She huffed.

He reached out. The tips of his fingers found her collarbone and whispered down her breast.

She jerked like he’d touched her with a live wire.

Unconcerned, his thumb traced tenderly across her nipple through the fabric of her gown. “Do you want to watch me make love to you?”

“No,” she slapped his hand away.

“I didn’t think so.”

He stood and unbuttoned his coat.

“Take off your dress.”

A long, pregnant pause, then the rustle of sheets followed by the soft slip-sigh of silk sliding over skin.

He imagined what he would see if he turned on those blue-white lights. Her beautiful, accusing eyes and her fragile nakedness, trembling in rage-filled disgrace. It wasn’t that he couldn’t bare the sight. No, it was that he wanted to _feel_ it, to kiss it with his mouth and hold it in his hands, to read it with his touch the same way the blind read their raised script. To know it wasn’t another dream or a delusion of a lonely, damaged, darkened mind. To know she was real and really here, with him.

Forever.

“Lie down,” he told her.

She did and she didn’t – he found her curled up like a child in the center of the bed, her arms crossed over her breasts and her knees tucked up to her chin.

He gathered her up and kissed her hair. “I won’t hurt you.”

“You have already,” she whispered through the space between her knees.

It made him harder.

He rolled her onto her back and, with painstaking tenderness, unwound her arms and legs, until he was settled over her. His big body sheltered her from the prying dark as her knees split wide apart to accommodate the brutal breadth of his hips. He wrapped his arms around her, cradling her cherishingly.

His beloved.

“Rey.”

He kissed her.

His fingers drove down the flat plane of her body, between her breasts, chasing the hollowing of her stomach as she exhaled a sob into his mouth. He found the narrow seam of her sex and parted her gently to touch her moist, tender flesh.

She wasn’t wet.

Their lips parted. She tucked her face into the bend of her arm.

He worked her softly, following the tempo set by her breath with his mouth and with his fingers, kissing the taut skin of her neck as he stroked the sensitive bundle of nerves hidden in her folds.

His cock wept against her thigh. Heart straining, he struggled to breathe.

She breathed in fits and starts - choked gasps and harsh pants punctuated by a quiet, strangled keening. The slick sound of his touch filled the room.

He wound one hand through her hair and the other around his cock.

Her breath caught as he pushed roughly inside her.

“Shh-shh.” He pinned her struggling, scratching hands between them and tipped her head back with his hand in her hair.

He moved gently through her, withdrawing almost completely with each thrust, then reaching forward for that secret, sacred part of her that belonged to him. She juddered under and around him, gripping his cock so hard he thought he’d black out from the agony and the pleasure. Her hands pushed frantically at his chest as her legs locked over his hips. She dug with her heels against the small of his back.

His heart pounded through his ribs, reaching for her.

“Come, baby. Baby, come.”

Her body stretched and tensed as her cunt clamped violently around him, arresting him, wringing him. His spine stacked tight. He stopped breathing.

The image slammed into his mind in a sweeping broadside: A dark, strong body twined inside of a smaller, paler one. A broad face gleaming in the dawn’s fervent, selfless light. A kiss, desperate and deep. Two lovers at the beginning of the end.

_I will never stop loving you._

Her voice.

_He can’t make me._

Rey’s voice.

_He can take my body, but he can’t have my heart. It will always be yours._

My _wife’s_ voice.

_I will never stop loving you._

Through the savage tremors of his orgasm, the dull roaring in his ears, Ren heard her shaking whisper all the way to his guts.

“I’ll never love you. Never.”

He reared and fell back gracelessly off the bed. His feet tangled in the bedding on the floor; he kicked viciously to free himself. Naked and blinded at once by darkness and daybreak, he fumbled into a pair of slacks.

The last thing he heard as he threw himself stumbling and shaking out into the hall was the sound of her weeping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, that's right - rape a bitch and Pastel will fucking **wreck** you.
> 
> Hit me up in the comments if you think Finn is waaaaaay hotter than Baby Vader :)


	8. What's Worse, Lookin' Jealous or Crazy, Jealous or Crazy (I'd Rather Be Crazy)

Ren’s hands shook. He pressed his palms against his eyes. “Take control of your emotions.”

Over and over again, he saw his beautiful wife - naked, breathtaking, breathless. She was touching, smiling-

His breathing shallowed out as the room began to close in from all sides. Burning like a raw nerve, he gulped for air.

 _Take control of your emotions_.

His ribs ached. He pounded his heart with his fist and snarled.

_Take control-_

“It won’t work, kiddo.”

Across the table inside the empty conference room, Han Solo was sprawled in a chair like Ren’s. His feet were kicked up onto the table, his fingers laced together and tucked behind his head.

“You’re a real lady-killer, you know that?” He smiled ironically. “Must get that from your old man.”

_Impossible-_

Fear was such a clarifying emotion. It repelled his grief and launched Ren to his feet. “ _You_ \- I killed you. I watched the light leave your eyes. You’re dead.”

“Yeah-” Han lifted his jacket flap. From the angry, gaping wound beneath his diaphragm, the stench of rent ozone and cauterized flesh wafted up like smoke. “No kidding.”

Ren jolted, he had to cover his mouth and choke back a retch.

Eyes watering, he sputtered, “Wha- how-”

Han held up his hands. “Beats the hell outta me, kid.”

Summoning his old, festered contempt like an amulet against the damned, Ren raised his chin and sneered, “If you’ve come back to impart some fatherly advice, then you’re an even bigger fool in death.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure we’re past the father-son chats.” Han left his lapel open. His wound stayed naked to the room.

Ren couldn’t stop seeing it as he looked at him.

“I came here to warn you-”

Ren snorted. “Warn me?”

He reached for his saber. Up until that moment, he’d forgotten he was shirtless, shoeless, and completely unarmed.

_Fuck._

Han shook his head. “You were always like that, even as a little boy.”

“Like what?” Ren snapped, seething. “Disappointing? An embarrassment? A black mark on the grand Solo moniker?”

“Angry,” Han said softly, seriously.

He stood. “You were always angry.”

Ren’s fists clenched. Behind his close-lipped sneer, he ground his teeth.

_Take control of your emotions._

“Your mother blamed me,” Han continued around the table, “because I wasn’t around-”

Ren drew back, suspicious, and scoffed, “An abysmal understatement-”

“Later, she blamed the Dark Side. And your grandfather. Then Luke.”

Han stopped just out of arm’s reach. “Then, of course, Snoke.”

His eyes drifted over Ren’s face. They were soft and sad.

It reminded Ren of Rey, the way she'd looked at him, when she called him Darth Vader.

His hatred surged anew. “The failings have been innumerable, yes.”

"No, son," Han shook his head. “It wasn't them, and it wasn't me. I wish it was. But I remember-”

He stopped, working the lump in his throat before he continued.

“I remember a baby boy, who would sit alone on the floor, push everyone else away, and beat his toys until they smashed into pieces. Then he’d hold them in his hands, so tight no one could take them, and cry his heart out."

He reached out and held the ruined half of Ren's face.

"You have a violent heart, Ben. You always have."

Ren blinked, and realized the rims of his lashes were wet.

“Father-”

“Let her go.”

Though soft and beseeching, the words fell on him like an open-handed slap.

Ren reeled away from him, stunned.

Together with the hole in his chest, Han’s eyes stared at him, pleading. “Let her go, son, before you break her into pieces. Like you broke me. Like you broke your mother.”

_Mother._

What had she said?

_My son is dead._

“Get out.”

Ren wrenched his chair away from the table. He hurled it with all his strength.

“Get out!”

He picked up another.

This time, the chair smashed into the table and cracked.

Rage-blind and snarling, he snatched for a third.

“Get out! Get out get out get out get out- !”

Not until the conference room was destroyed, and he was positive there was no trace of Han left among the wreckage, did Ren finally fall to his knees and weep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so I realize I have ended two consecutive chapters with weeping. 
> 
> But Kanye says never apologize for one's artistic choices.
> 
> The tide will start to turn, friends, I promise. Next chapter. Hang in there. You are brave.


	9. All I Wanna Hear Comin' Out Your Mouth is, "Yes, Queen"

The next day, he dressed alone inside his dressing room.

He chose a simple, somber wardrobe – uniform coat and trousers, boots, a black cape. He dressed swiftly, solemnly, and without vanity. Unlike the day before, which had rung as a triumphant beginning, today was like the start of a bleak march, to what desolate place he could not imagine, and did not care to.

As he finished the complex buckle on his sword belt, he met himself in the mirror.

His reflection stared back with the dark, devastated expression of a man who’s just realized the slave-bride he traded galactic peace for has given her faithless heart to another. A man who’s entire pride had been leveled in an evening. A man haunted.

Alone in the room, he heard his father’s final plea.

_Let her go._

He closed his eyes.

The Darkness came to him slowly at first, like a chill mist crawling up from the valley. It curled through and filled him like smoke, clinging to muscle, bone and organ.

 _Give her to me,_ he commanded. _Make her love me._

It whispered back to him, dark, sensual murmurs that salved the festering hurt in his heart.

_Show her your control, your absolute Power._

_And she will love you._

He opened his eyes.

This time, when he looked into the mirror, he saw only the Dark Emperor. Darth Vader.

He smiled.

The last thing he did as he left the room was pull a pair of black gloves over his red-raw hands.

 

 

 

He found her in the same place he'd left her - their bedroom.

She was perched on the edge of the bed, smoothing her hands over her lap in a nervous loop to keep the silk from creasing. Already, her attendants had dressed her for her first day as Queen of the Galaxy.

Nothing could have prepared him for her loveliness.

In a slate-colored gown with sleeves and a high collar that was somehow more sensual than it was conservative, she wore his ring on her married hand, and his insignia - the symbol of the First Order - on her breast, above her heart. Her hair had been braided into the intricate style worn by Nabooian brides, interwoven with dark strands of crystal. She looked like an Aalderaanian peeress from the fairytales his mother used to whisper into his hair as a boy curled into her lap. She looked porcelain, elegant, fragile.

It took his breath away.

_Take control of your cock- emotions. Take control of your emotions._

_Asshole._

He extended his hand.

She hesitated, then took it. He drew her smoothly to her feet.

The jewels in her hair tinkled softly.

He folded her hand inside the crook of his arm. “Are you ready to begin?”

She faltered, then took a deep breath and pulled her shoulders back. She met his eyes.

He wanted to burn in their fire.

“I’m ready," she said.

His smirk cinched the scarred half of his face. “We’ll see.”

 

 

 

“So, did you keep Snoke’s old throne, or have you built a new one with the bones of your enemies?”

He snorted.

The elevator continued its climb up the North Tower, towards his alleged throne room.

Her hand was still tucked in at his side. She avoided his eyes, pretending to be very interested in the cuff of her sleeve as she continued, “I didn’t bring any bones, so we’ll have to make mine out of something else. Junk parts, maybe. For a scavenger-Queen,” she mumbled the last words to herself.

“Don’t be ridiculous, beloved. You don't need a throne." His lips twitched to hide a smirk. "You’ll sit in my lap.”

Her startle was darkly satisfying. “You’re disgusting.”

With the side of his gloved finger, he stroked her, from the lobe of her ear to where neck and collar met. He smiled ironically. “Mornings suit you.”

She jerked away from him, hair jewels jingling emphatically.

“Don’t,” she snapped.

“Don’t what?” He loomed closer.

She backed further into the elevator and bared her teeth. “Don’t flirt with me.”

“You started it,” he reminded her mildly.

“Wha- me? With bones? You’re demented,” she spat. “Delusional. Pathetic.”

He corned her against the back-lit plexiplastic, and dipped his head.

“You're falling for me, I can tell already.”

She looked into his eyes. “I _hate_ you.”

He kissed her.

It was a soft, searing kiss, full of entreat and longing. He touched her everywhere – gentle, worshipful touches that slipped off her gown like whispers. Her hair jewels tinkled again, and he suddenly thought of a music box that had belonged to his mother, one that he smashed in a fit of rage, over what he couldn’t remember. He pictured the pretty dancer inside. His secret treasure.

Sadness and violent want overwhelmed him. He took her by the hips and kissed her deeply.

She twisted out of his grip and slapped him.

 _Hard_.

Both of them panted, like they’d been running for miles. They _had_ been running, across planets and stars, through systems and galaxies.

From their Destiny.

_Not anymore. No more running. No more games._

_Show her._

“You,” he snarled softly, shakily, “You won’t do that again.”

“Or what,” she scoffed savagely, “You’ll kill me? It’s not in you. I’ve seen it. You killed Luke, and your father, but you won’t kill me.” She stepped up to him, teeth bared. “You don’t have the strength.”

“No, I don't.”

He opened his mind to her, allowing it to fill the space between and around them.

"I don't have to."

Her eyes widened, he saw his grim reflection in them as he replayed his fight with the traitor on Starkiller. His saber driving the deserter backwards. His cross-guard searing into his shoulder. His wide slash, and then the screaming. Red blood on white snow.

“Stop-”

He let the scene play out the way he imagined it last night, alone amongst his wreckage - his saber tip spearing through the traitor’s heart. Twisting. The light leaving his eyes.

Just like it left his father’s.

“Stop it!” Her tone was different, desperate. Pleading. She clutched his coat, wrung frantically at the fabric. “Stop! Kylo, stop it! Please…”

“You will never do that again.”

She understood he wasn’t talking about the slap. He could see it in her beautiful, frightened eyes.

“ _Never_.”

“No never, never,” she shook her head. Her knees buckled, she hung on by her hands on his coat. “I’ll never-”

He shored up her weight with his arm around her waist, and bent his head, so close they shared each other’s breath.

“Convince me.”

Her breath buffeted his chin in quick, panicked bursts. She licked her lips.

“Ok,” she whispered. “Ok.”

She reached for his face. This time, her touch was tender, and trembling.

She stroked his brow, the bridge of his nose, his lips. His scar.

He closed his eyes.

“Kylo,” she breathed, and kissed him.

Her lips drew him in, she laced her fingers gently through his hair. He gathered her against him in a sensual embrace. His tongue met hers.

She shuddered, in agony or arousal or repulsion, he could not be sure.

Or care less.

The elevator stopped smoothly.

“ _Floor eight-hundred-and-twenty-six. North Tower._ ”

He let her go slowly, a dark thrill passing through him when she couldn’t meet his eyes.

“My darling,” he offered her his arm.

She took it, and with her other hand cut off a tear as it streaked for her chin.

Together they stepped through the corridor and into his command room.

Thirty generals and cabinet members rose from their seats around an oblong table and saluted him.

“Supreme Leader.”

Then, all together, they bowed to their Queen.

“Your Majesty.”

He heard her exhale.

She lifted her chin. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looks like Kylo's using the gun Rey shot him with to take her hostage. Smart man.


	10. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How does the defendent plead to the charge of plotless, pointless, gratuitous sex?
> 
> Guilty, your Honor.

Her spine arched. “Uhn, God...”

He weighted her down with a heavy forearm across her hips and stroked her sex with long, languid laps, relishing in her generous slick that coated him from chin to chest. Her thighs, spread wide by the breadth of his shoulders, trembled violently.

His world trembled with them.

“Please-” she whimpered.

He drew her swollen hood between his lips and suckled firmly.

She bucked and came.

 _That’s three_.

His cock ached painfully. He swore into her cunt and ground himself against the mattress.

Her fingers flexed and curled, she twisted her small wrists inside his grip.

“Please stop… I- c-can't...”

He drove her onward, watching her with dark eyes over the shallow rise of her belly as his tongue chased her tender pearl around and around its nest.

Her head tipped back. She babbled incoherently.

He bullied her harder, faster, as all around them, her aura crackled and shivered.

She shuddered, keening. “ _Kylo_ …”

He rose up and over her, a tidal wave of malevolent triumph. His elbows slotted in the groove of her knees, he took her hips in a brutal grip. His cock sawed through the soaked seam of her sex.

“Look at me," he growled.

She did, as all ten of her juddering fingertips rode the rise of his biceps to touch his neck.

“What’s my name?”

“Lord Vader,” she whispered breathlessly. 

He slammed home, bringing her hips to meet him as the head of his cock butted against her womb. Her cunt clamped down around him, she came again with a startled, strangled shriek.

“ _Fuck yes_.” He gritted his teeth against his own orgasm and stroked into her savagely.

Her hands scrambled at his shoulders, slip-sliding on his sweat-slicked skin.

He caught her wrists and pinned her.

“Say my name.”

Beneath him, her body bounced with every brutal thrust.

“L-lord… oh God-”

Her head lolled back. She closed her eyes.

He snarled, “Look at me and say it.”

Her eyes peeled open. She panted.

“Lah- Lord... Vader…”

He fell forward. His forearms framed her face as his cock dug deep inside her.

Midway between a moan and wailing, she convulsed.

He gasped for breath. “Fuck-”

His orgasm bore down on him - he felt it in his heartbeat, in the pressure building at the base of his spine. He threaded their fingers together and pressed his face into her neck.

His voice was violent and raw.

“Say it.”

She panted raggedly against his ear.

He slowed the inevitable by stirring himself inside her, their bodies making slick, perverse sounds as he ground against her, filling her completely, feeling every inch of her that belonged to him.

Her legs locked around him. She groaned.

“ _Say it_.”

“I- I love…  I love you...”

Pleasure cracked across him like a whip. He clenched their hands and came.

For several eternal seconds, he was submerged in blinding, deafening static. Inside her, his cock jerked in time with his heartbeat, pouring into her every want, every hope, every secret desire, as her body drew him against her womb and drank deeply.

They trembled together in the aftershocks. She clung around his shoulders as he cradled her covetously to him.

_My Rey._

“You are everything, beloved,” he murmured against her pulse. “Everything... everything...”

Her fingers slipped through his hair. 

“I’m so tired," she sighed.

He rose over her.

Her eyes drooped. Her fingers fell slowly through his hair, down his cheek.

He kissed her fingertips, her palm, her wrist, until the effort of holding up her hand became too much, and it drifted onto her chest, like a leaf falling between her breasts. 

“So sleep.”

“You?” she murmured.

“I’ll be in the mediation chamber.” He stroked her hair back from her eyes.

They seemed to close against her will. “Breakfast."

“It’ll be there.”

“Jelly,” she mumbled.

He smiled. It puckered the rent half of his face. “If you desire.”

“Hmm.”

He kissed her temple. “Miss me, Rey.”

“Mm.”

He tucked her into the sheets.

At the elevator to their living quarters, he told the attendant guards, “Her Majesty is not to be disturbed.”

And waited for their synchronous, metallic answer.

“Very good, sire.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have nothing to say in my defense. If you're looking for plot, I'll hopefully have something up tomorrow or the next day.


	11. The Most Important Meal of the Day

A piece of cold slaak slathered in an ungodly amount of jelly balanced on her fingertips. She concentrated intensely on adding slices of pickled egg to the top as she asked, “So? What’s next?”

“Let’s see.” He set his cup on its saucer and consulted the tablet beside his place setting.

A routine had evolved over the last several months, whereby he’d wake her with a magnificent fuck, then allow her to ease gently into the morning while he communed with the Darkness, then reunite with her over breakfast, where he’d read aloud like a common secretary Her Majesty's obligations and appointments, because Rey of Jakku, Queen of the Galaxy and The Last Little Jedi, could not read.

No one had taught her how.

“You have a dress fitting at nine-”

She snorted.

“And a report on refugees in the Outer Rim at ten-”

“If thaf wif Gennal Huff?” she asked with her mouth full. Bits of masticated egg and shaak fell onto her dress.

He handed her the napkin from his lap. Hers was still folded neatly next to her untouched silverware. “Yes, it’s with General Hux.”

Her smack-smack-swallow made him wince.

“I don’t trust him,” she said. “He’s hiding something. Something dark.” She rubbed the cloth around her face.

It spread jam as far up as her cheeks.

“Did I get it?”

_Nope._

“Mostly.” He crooked his finger.

She leaned in. The gold beads on her headdress tinkled like rainfall.

He cupped her face in his glove and thumbed at the mess.

Images came back to him uninvited, scenes he’d seen through their bond. A small, bony-ribbed girl with bruised knees and sunburned cheeks. Tiny blistered fingers scraping up meager portions. Miles of endless desert. The lonely, moonless night.

Anger, barb-edged and rankling, bloomed inside of him.

If her parents were still alive, he would kill them.

The soft sound of her voice pulled him back from his thoughts.

“None of them like you,” she was saying. “They’re afraid of you, because they can’t guess what you’ll do next. They understood what Snoke wanted. They don’t know what you want.”

_What about you, Rey? Do you know what I want?_

He chased a crumb from the corner of her mouth. “And here you were, worried you wouldn’t make any friends.”

She swatted his hand away. “I’m serious, Kylo.”

She stared earnestly at him, chewing her lip.

He’d kept her long enough by now to know what that look meant. She had something important to say, and she wanted him to drag it of her.

“Spit it out, Rey.”

“It’s- some of them are… plotting. I can’t be sure what. They’ve sort of, I don't know, cloaked it somehow. I can't see the details, but I can see their intent.”    

She hesitated. Her hands wrung his napkin in her lap. “They mean to kill you.”

“I see.” He sat back and took a sip from his coffee. “I'd better get on that.”

Her brow furrowed cutely. “You mean, you know already?”

“Yes, my darling, I’m deeply aware.” 

“But you're not worried?” she persisted.

“No.” He set the cup on its saucer. “They’re a bunch of deluded old fools in the twilight of their mediocre careers. Most of them couldn’t plot their way out of a porg’s ass.”

“But General Hux-“

“Hux-the-Ginger-halfwit has less chance of staging a successful mutiny than the rebels did at restoring the Republic.” He smiled sharply. “Which is to say, less than zero.”

She bristled.

He leaned in with his arm propped on the table between them. “But do you know what I find fascinating, my meddling little wife? Is that _you_ are worried. For me.”

“Wha- I’m not- no. No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are,” he murmured, looking into her eyes. Eyes that were silver in the blue-white light. “I can see it behind your eyes. You’re afraid.”

She turned back to her plate and its odd assortment of pickled meat and sweet pastries. In her lap, her hands twisted his napkin tighter.

“If I am afraid of something,” she said quietly, “it’s that they’ll kill you before I do.”

“That’s my girl.”

His sardonic smile pursed the rent half of his face.

“Now finish your breakfast.”


	12. This Is A Man's World...

“You’re not listening to me!” She slapped a spot on the table next to his glass. Water sloshed up over the rim and splashed his tablet.

Through his nose, he sighed.

“These are our people _,”_ she persisted, “We have an obligation-”

“Forgive me, _Your Highness_ ,” From across the table, the General spat out her title like a foul-tasting insult, “but the proposals you make are not only dangerously indulgent, they sail perilously close to the edge of treason!”

She snapped, “Better treason than murder, _General_.”

Ren propped his elbows on the table and rubbed at the dull, persistent pounding behind his eyes with his gloved fingertips.

_Fuck me with a light saber…_

For the past four hours, Rey and the General had been shouting in circles over reports of civil unrest in the Outer Rim. The General, an unwavering autocrat, demanded they crush all signs of insurrection at first blush, least the flames of anarchy engulf them, while Rey, with her usual romantic moralism, pleaded they lay down their weapons and envelope their enemies in a warm, democratizing embrace.

It was an absolute shit-show.

Ren's deep murmur cut through their bickering.

“Captain Phasma.”

Both of them stopped and looked at her.

She sat alone at the end of the table, where there was less light from the tracks in the ceiling. Her presence was almost undetectable; only the thin blue halo that was the florescent reflected in her armor gave her away.

She inclined her head. “My Lord.”

The tension in his shoulders decreased by degrees.

_At last, the voice of reason._

“Please.” He made a deferent gesture. “Your thoughts?”

She began in her crisp, metallic manner, “I agree with Her Majesty-”

Rey snorted. The General ground his teeth.

Ren ignored them.

“Go on.”

“The riots have reached a critical mass. I recommend we assemble a task force to tour the reservations and determine if these incidents are isolated, or if they are indicative.”

He gave her a crooked smile that pursed the rent half of his face.

“Very good, Captain. Prepare your task force. They leave in three days.”

"Thank you, My Lord.”

“Wait, stop-” Rey leaned in over the table, her arm outstretched. “I don't understand. Indicative of what, exactly, Captain?”

"Of a resurgence in rebel forces, Your Majesty.”

"A resurgence? But that’s ridiculous,” Rey shook her head. Her headdress tinkled softly. “The rebels have disbanded. The Rebellion is over.”

From the other side of the room, Captain Phasma spoke the truth that Ren himself had always suspected. “We have no guarantee they will honor the treaty.”

“No guarantee?” Rey’s pitch rose and warbled.

Like a cornered animal, she bared her teeth. "Are you stupid? Are you blind?"

He laid his hand on her arm, gently. "Beloved-"

She wrenched away from him.

“No. We made a deal." She looked at each of them. "All of us, sitting in this room. You said you'd stop the war if... if I..."

Her breath hitched. "Oh God."

She pressed her palms against her eyes. "I'm going to be sick."

The General hid his malicious sneer behind a sip of water.

Captain Phasma sat perfectly still. From behind her visor, Ren felt her watching him.

"Rey."

He took her wrists, and slowly lowered her hands.

Her eyes were wet.

A slick, unfamiliar feeling pooled low in his gut. It took him several pounding heartbeats to recognize what it was.

_Guilt._

"What if-" her mouth trembled. She licked her lips.

The fragile strand of trust between them stretched and quivered.

“What if this... task force tells you that the riots are indicative, that there are rebels on the reservations? What are you going to do?”

He looked down at her hands. So pale and small in his.

A lifetime ago, on some distant planet, he'd watched as dawn’s first seam of light touched the infinite dark.

 _Benjamin-boy_ , his mother used to call him. When her long, elegant fingers stroked softly through his hair. _My darling Benjamin-boy._

His eyes met hers.

“I will destroy them."


	13. ... But It Would Be Nothing, Nothing, Nothing Without A Woman Or A Girl

Sighing, he rapped again.

“Rey, enough. Come out here.”

"Now," he added.

She'd been sulking inside their bedroom for over an hour, and already his patience had worn from thin to threadbare.

Captain Phasma's impassive reproach, left intentionally on the surface of her mind for him to find, played back to him.

_You’ve overindulged her._

His head pounded. He kneaded his temples. 

“Rey, my darling. Open the fucking door. Please."

No sound came from inside. All he could hear was the soft hush of air as it cycled through the ventilation system, and below that, the constant, quiet thrum of the ship.

Bracing his forearm on the door, he rested his forehead against it and closed his eyes.

He reached out.

Her aura appeared first, warm and awash with pale blue light, like sunlight through water. It curved softly around her, creating her shape with its negative space.

He brushed it with the fingertips of his awareness. A familiar warmth stirred in his loins and in his heart.

_I love her._

The tightness inside his chest loosened. He spoke her name like an invocation.

_Rey._

There she was, sitting on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands.

Her hair was torn out of its delicate style. It hung in twisted half-braids around her face. Her adornments were cast off like jetsam on the tile around her bare feet, the beads of her ruined headdress making a galaxy of unwanted stars on the polished dark.

Slowly, she raised her head.

The hurt in her eyes was transcendent. It seared his soul and burned in the valley of the scar that rent him head-to-heart.

She snarled, _Get out._

 

 

 

 

 

 

He bared his teeth at the perfect Dark.

" _You.”_

Inside his meditation chamber, sealed off from all Light, the Darkness surrounded him, pressing in on all sides.

He was not afraid.

“You lied to me. You said if I showed her my Power, she would be mine."

A shadow shifted across his thoughts.

_Isn't she?_

"It's not enough," he snarled. "I want her _more_. I want her to love me."

His fists clenched. His gloves creaked.

"Make her love me."

 _Show her,_ said the Darkness.

"You’re not listening! It isn't working." He raked his hair. "Nothing is working."

Echoes rebounded off the walls of his mind, like ripples overlapping on a single surface.

He strained. "I can't understand you."

_Take control of your emotions._

He closed his eyes and pictured a dark island. It drifted alone through black waters, a small, distant shape against the moonless, starless night.

A feeling emerged from the whispering clamor.

_Desire._

Like the pages of a book blown by the wind, fast-moving images flickered behind his eyes.

His beloved, naked, shaking, panting, kissing, smiling, touching, arching, begging, pleading, needing, sobbing, wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting-

Wanting him.

Only him.

"Yes," he breathed.

The answer came.

 _Give_.

"Give what?" He opened his eyes.

There was nothing but Darkness to meet him.

"I've given everything I have to her. Everything."

_Give what she desires._

The words came from deep within his intemperate heart.

_And she will love you._

 

 

 

 

When dinner came, he was alone in the dining room.

He sat with elbows braced on top of the table and hands stacked under his chin. He stared at her empty place.

The seconds slipped by in silence.

Her face, smeared with jam and smiling, wavered in his mind.

Snarling, he picked up his plate and hurled it. It smashed against the wall.

He pushed back from the table and stood.

 

 

 

 

 

Did Padme Amidala ever love Darth Vader?

He looked out at the stars and wondered.

She'd loved noble, handsome Anakin, surely.

But what about the creature in the mask?

A thin streak of silver appeared suddenly across the stars.

The corner of his mouth ticked upwards.

“Captain Phasma.”

A trick of her reflection in the glass.

“My Lord.”

He turned.

After all the worlds he'd conquered, the armies he'd fought and Jedi he'd slain, she was still the most formidable force he’d ever clapped eyes on.

Which was why he’d decided to spare her the shaak shit.

“I want you to delay your task force. Her Majesty will be accompanying you on your tour.”

“In what capacity, My Lord?"

“Oversight.”

He watched closely for her reaction.

She had none, other than to state, “She will need to be chipped, for when she inevitably decides to escape.”

His lips twitched to hide a smirk. “It's going that well, you think?”

“My Lord," she struggled to keep her exasperation in check, "I am not a politician, I have no flare for diplomacy. My words are what they are.”

He made an open gesture.

“So speak plainly.”

“In my career, I have learned two lessons. The first is that the greatest strength one can have is self-possession."

_Fair enough._

He nodded. "And the second?"

"The second is that at the core of every rebel lies a treacherous and mercurial heart.”

"Captain-"

She reached up and removed her helmet.

Where her left eye, cheek and nose should have been, there were matted stacks of grafted tissue. The fibers were thick and glossy, welded together across her face and down her neck into her armor, where they spanned her entire body in jagged layers.

He knew because he had stood behind the sterility barrier, a black periapt against her enemies and Death, as the surgical droids reconstructed her from sheets of synthetic skin.

He had been the one, shrouded by Darkness, to descend into the collapsing, molten wreckage of the first _Supremacy_ to reclaim her as General Hux and a hundred of her soldiers stood back and watched. Her weight, heavy and scorching across his back, was a feeling he'd never forget.

He approached her, stopping when he was an arm’s length away, and looked into her only eye.

His last true allegiant.

“You will _never_ ~~~~speak of her that way again. Or I will kill you. Do you understand?"

 

 

 

 

 

The door was unlocked when he returned.

It took no time at all for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He found her lying in their bed on her side. Her back was turned to him.

He knew she was not asleep.

"I've issued the order, you'll oversee the tour."

She said nothing.

He decided he was too exhausted to care.

"Decide on your terms tonight. I'll draft them in the morning."

More silence.

His hands raked through his hair. He sighed.

Rather than face her refusal, he chose the absolution of a scalding shower.

Her whisper met him at the threshold.

"Thank you."

He looked back over his shoulder into the dark.

"Yes, you will."


	14. Silly Sith Lord, Tricks Are For Kids

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: It's about to be some grown. ass. shit. up in here. So read the tags and check yo'self before you wreck yo'self.
> 
> Children under age should not ride this ride. If you have a history of heart conditions, such as palpitations or arhythmia, consult with your doctor. All other guests, please fasten your seatbelts and stow your belongings in the seat pocket in front of you.
> 
> Enjoy your walk on the Dark Side.

Two days later, something strange happened.

Something that had never happened before.

She touched him.

Willingly.

And on purpose.

At first, he thought it was a mistake.

She’d finished licking the last of her breakfast off her fingers when she announced, “I have a meeting at noon, to talk about adding funds for relief aid to the capital budget.”

“Yes,” he glanced over the rim of his coffee, at where her schedule sat open on his tablet. “I’m aware.”

“I-” she hesitated. Her hands twisted nervously in her lap.

“Could you… come with me? To the meeting?”

He looked at her.

“It’s just…” She glanced around the dining room. “I can’t read the reports, and you- They’re so afraid of you, and I need that.”

She looked at him. “I need you. There. With me.”

“I see,” he said softly.

Her eyes searched his in earnest. She chewed her lip.

_I need you._

He inclined his head. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

She let out a breath, and smiled.

The universe unfurled inside his chest.

She stood and smoothed her gown. “So, I’ll see you? There, I mean. At the meeting-thing. For budgets?”

His eyebrow quirked. “If not before.”

“Oh. Right. Because- because. Ok.”

He raised both brows at her.

She gave him a bizarre little curtsey and started for the door.

As she passed behind him, her fingers whispered through his hair.

The gesture was so soft he was sure he’d dreamed it. But when he followed the trail of her touch, he came away with crumbs on his glove.

 

 

 

 

 

The second time occurred days later, in the elevator.

She wore a stunning gown in the same sunfire hue as his saber blade, as his aura. Her lips were painted to match the scarlet-colored crystals that trembled in her hair. His ring gleamed on her finger.

Her beauty was excruciating.

He told so, dipping next to her ear so that she’d feel his murmur deep in her spine.

“When I’m with you, I feel like the most powerful man in the universe.”

“But you are.”

She tipped up her chin and looked at him. A fever flushed across her cheeks, obscuring the constellation made by her freckles.

Her face, like the rest of her, was softer than when he first took her. Fuller.

She had bloomed in his love.

His pulse tripped into a race as her hand reached up and covered his heart.

“I can feel it,” she whispered. “W-when you’re inside me. I feel how powerful you are.”

His heart thrashed against the cage of his ribs as all the blood in his body surged towards his cock.

Her eyes dropped to his mouth. She licked her red, quivering lips. “It overwhelms me, and I- I-”

She pushed up onto the balls of her feet and kissed him. Her tongue pressed into his mouth.

He crushed his body against hers as his aura swept up around them and roared.

“Show me,” she breathed in the slip of space between their lips.

He tasted her fear on his tongue.

“I need to feel it again. Show me the Darkness-”

His humanity stretched and snapped.

He stepped back, snarling, and slammed the stop lever so hard the control panel cracked inward and showered them in sparks.

He bent and caught her by the flesh of her ass and lifted her off the floor. He drove them forward until they slammed against the wall, pinning her there with his chest as he tore viciously at the miles and miles of red silk hiding her sex.

When he found her legs, he hauled them up around his waist.

Her arms were clapped around his neck. She was shaking violently.

“Rey,” he rasped for forgiveness, even as his gloved fingers sought mercilessly for the gusset of her undergarments.

He found nothing but her slick, naked sex.

She was completely bare beneath her dress.

She met his shock with wet eyes and a trembling snarl.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she warbled. “I am not afraid.”

A tear streaked down her cheek.

“You have taken _everything_ from me. And I won’t fear you anymore.” Her hands fisted in his hair. “You work for me now. Until I say I’m done with you. Do you understand me, Sith?”

The Darkness inside him reared back on its haunches and howled with feral delight. His cock swelled almost to bursting.

He wanted to fall at her feet and worship her, to beg for her whip, to lap greedily at her sex like a starving, slavering hellhound.

Instead he grinned, a malevolent, triumphant sneer that twisted and gnarled his scar. The scar she gave him on Starkiller, the night she baptized him in fire and carved her name onto his soul. This tiny girl-child with frightened eyes and a warrior’s heart.

With quaking hands, he fumbled through the wet fabric of his trousers and wrenched his cock free. Desire reached up and strangled him as its head sluiced through her drenched lips. She was dripping for this. For _him_.

“I am worthy,” he snarled.

“Prove it.” She changed up her grip on his shoulders, bracing herself even as fear eclipsed her beautiful young face. “Show me.”

His chest heaved, his fingers dug into the backs of her thighs.

He lanced up through her core and struck home. She bit down through a scream onto his shoulder.

He slammed into her again, making the carriage shuddered with the violence of it. Her cunt clamped around him, her walls pulsed in time with the thundering of his heart.

Another stroke, even more brutal than the last, and she came keening into his uniform coat.

He fucked through the exquisite pressure, hammering her with deep, pounding thrusts that rattled his bones and twisted his guts. The elevator flooded with their harsh, choked breathing and the raw, sick sounds of their sex. Her slick seeped through his trousers and soaked him, he was suffocating in a miasma of her heat and her screams and her sweet, sweet scent.

“You love this,” he gloated breathlessly. He was drowning in this, in her. “ _Say it_.”

“I love it.” Her head tipped back. She convulsed. “I love it, oh God, I love it I love it I love it-”

Her climax grasped and pulled him, dragging him deeper, egging him on. He met every one of her demands and each of her desires, driving her higher, swallowing her ecstasy as her praise poured over him like sanctification.

“Good Kylo yes Kylo harder Kylo faster Kylo Kylo Kylo Kylo-”

He fucked her ruthlessly, until his thighs burned and his cock ached and she shook so hard her teeth chattered. Until her dress was soaked with come and sweat, until her slick coated him knees to navel, until her eyes rolled back and her soul spasmed and she begged and babbled and pleaded, “I love you Kylo Kylo I love you I love you Kylo Kylo I love you-”

“Tell me,” he rasped. His voice was nothing but a hoarse, choking whisper, each word a dead man’s last. “ _Tell me you’ve had enough_.”

“Enough, please!” she screamed. “Enough enough enough enough enough-”

He pressed his face into the crook of her neck and stepped into her, wrapping his arms around her, trapping her and crushing her and cradling her. She clung desperately to him, her body drawing him to her chalice.

He came so hard he blacked out.

In that infinite second, he saw a sun crest over its horizon. It blinded him, burned him, made the Darkness in his bones snarl and rattle.

He felt no fear.

Only a deep, roiling, ravenous hunger, as his aura swept up and swallowed it whole. A total eclipse, Light veiled in Darkness.

Her protector. Her provider.

Her Darth Vader.

“I am strong enough,” he whispered into her ear, as they lay breathless and boneless on the elevator floor. His eyes burned hot and wet. He burrowed against her neck, against her womb. “I am strong enough. I am. I am.”

“I know you are,” she whispered.

They stayed that way for hours, clinging to one another like children afraid to face the cruel dawn.

 

 

The third time she touched him, it was dark.

He’d carried her to their refresher and drew her a bath. He bathed her tenderly, in warm water and in his tears that dripped from his lashes, as his fingers trembled over the marks he’d made on and inside her body.

“I hurt you,” he whispered. He tried swallowing and couldn’t.

She stroked his face, kissed his lips. Softly. “No, not anymore.”

He wrapped her up and took her to bed.

He fed her dinner by hand.

When she finished, she kissed his fingers one-by-one and sighed. “Thank you. You’re so good to me.”

After she fell asleep, he sat on the edge of the bed and silently beat the ache with his fist.

“What’s happening to me?” he rasped at the Darkness.

 _What you wanted_ , it sneered inside him. _What you always, always wanted_.

“It’s killing me,” he hissed.

 _Yes,_ the Darkness smiled. _Yes, it does._

Later, as he was drowsing beside her, her dry, cracked whisper split the dark.

“Kylo?”

His hand stroked down her naked back. “I’m here.”

“Don’t go,” she whimpered.

“Where would I go, beloved?”

She shuffled into his arms.

Even in the pitch-black, he closed his eyes to savor her.

“Kylo?”

“Yes, my darling?”

Her fingers curled into his collar. “I’m going to ask you a favor. But before I tell you what it is, I want you to say yes.”

“Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's right, the bitch is back. You can't keep a Jedi down for long ;)
> 
> And please y'all, do NOT come at me in the comments with that Ben Solo shit. Either you love you some darkass Kylo Ren, or go find one of those, "Love a bad boy good" stories that Archive is saturated with.
> 
> However, **wiggles eyebrows** if this tickled your pickle, please holler at your girl. I love reading your comments.
> 
> Love, Pastel


	15. Then You Say, "Go Slow", I Fall Behind. The Second Hand Unwinds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, I did it again. Opening with more pointless, gratuitous sex. This is rapidly devolving into porn with a sprinkling of plot.
> 
> *puts head in hands* 
> 
> Pastel Pastel Pastel...

“Shit, Kylo-”

She tried holding onto his shoulders, but sweat and the water beating from the showerhead above them made his skin too slick to grasp.

“I’m right here, baby.”

Keeping both feet firmly planted and his cock rooted deep inside her, he choked up his grip on her ass and hiked her higher up his body.

“I’ve got you.”

Her calves slipped down his thighs, she struggled to wrap them around his waist.

She strained and whimpered. “I’m falling-”

“No, you’re not. Rey-” He waited for her to look at him. “You’re not.”

Her forehead touched his. Her lips were parted.

She was trembling.

“Don’t- don’t drop me,” she warned him breathlessly.

“Not even a possibility.”

She cracked a tremulous smile.

He sought out the light behind her eyes. Those big, beautiful eyes.

“Relax. Let go.”

She nodded against him.

Her fingers laced together behind his neck. Slowly, she let herself go slack in his arms.

She sank into him by degrees. He took her weight easily, slotting the backs her knees against his arms as she settled into the wide span of his hands.

Deep in her center, the thick, flared head of his cock pressed flush against the mouth of her womb. All around him, she was warm and soft and wet.

His little girl. His beloved.

“Rey.” _Rey Rey Rey Rey Rey-_

Her eyes had drifted shut, the space between her brows was softly furrowed. Small drops of water dripped like tears off of her lashes and trembled on the tip of her nose.

“You’re so deep,” she whispered.

He flexed and arched.

“Take all of it.”

She shuddered. 

He stroked slowly, savoring the way her breath hitched and her teeth dragged her bottom lip between them as he raked through every part of her.

He shifted her slightly, changing his angle, and her cunt tightened around him. “ _Fuck_ -”

She keened, soft and long and low.

“There?” he rasped, digging at her womb and dragging against her walls.

Her nod was frenetic. “Yes-”

“Faster?”

Even more frantic. “ _God_ yes-”

His gut tightened at her moan, and again when she wailed softly and tugged his hair, as he fucked faster into her heat.

He lost himself in the feeling of her soft, slick body bouncing along his bigger, solid one, awash in the sensual sounds of their panting and the steady drone of water on glass; the loud, wet slap of their love making; her breathy, needy whimpers and his own low groans. The pressure at the base of his cock wound tighter, exquisite and excruciating.

“You feel so good,” she whimpered, “so big-”

Her eyes slit open. She chased the water droplets clinging to his lips with her tongue.

He squeezed her ass and stroked harder. The flesh around his metal hip burned with cold fire. He panted harshly into her mouth.

Her lips moved against his as she whispered, “Kylo you’re so good…”

His cock throbbed inside her.

“Rey-”

“You’re so deep… I feel you everywhere.”

Between words and breaths, she pressed soft, humid kisses to his face.

“It’s like you’re touching my heart.”

His breathing became harsher, punctuated by hard stops and gasping starts. He pumped harder, faster, as his heart tried to break through his ribs to reach her.

Her head tipped back. She tightened around him. “Kylo-”

“Wait for me, Rey,” he rasped.

She clung onto his shoulders and touched her forehead to his, fighting against the closing of her eyes.

“Don’t come for me yet, baby.” He concentrated on the feeling of her cunt around him.

“Hold on.”

She nodded. Their tongues touched between their mouths, without the pretext of kissing, just the wet, sensual slide as her fingers slipped through the slick hair at the base of his neck and raked softly against his scalp.

“I love you,” she whispered. She looked into his eyes. “I love you so much.”

His tempo stuttered. He gripped her too tight.

“It’s coming,” he gasped. He sped up, her body jostling and jolting against him. He felt her tighten around him and snarled, lungs and guts and soul burning like a dying sun as he slammed her down to meet him.

As the first hard jerk of his cock painted her womb, she spasmed.

They moaned together.

His love poured into her and overflowed as the universe flooded with white noise. He surrendered to a full-bodied shudder.

 _Rapture,_ whispered the Dark.

The sound of the water came back to him first. Then the touch of her lips, wet and sweet, as she kissed the end of his nose, his lashes, the space between his brows.

She laid her forehead against his and they breathed each other’s breath in the afterglow.

“It feels like I’m flying,” she whispered. Her eyes were closed. “I can see the stars.”

The ache. The endless, endless ache.

“Say my name,” he murmured.

“Kylo-” He felt the soft hush of her breath on his lips. “Kylo Kylo Kylo.”

Inside him, the Darkness hummed and sighed.

_Immortal._

Her love would make him live forever.

 

 

 

 

 

“ _Floor two hundred, East Hanger, Main Bridge._ ”

The elevator slowed its smooth decent.

Tucked in beside him, she huffed. “We’re so late. Hux is going to be unbearable.”

“Whose fault is that?” he asked mildly.

“Wha-” she balked. Her headdress chimed softly. “Yours, obviously.”

“Oh?” His eyebrow quirked. “Because I recall going into the refresher alone this morning. And then a woman who looked _remarkably_ like my wife came in ass-naked and said- Hm, what was it?” He cupped his chin in his glove. “Ah yes, _Kiss me good morning, Kylo_.”

“I said _kiss_ -”

He projected an image between them, detailed and crystal clear, of her small, softs hands tugging his cock to life as she pressed her breasts against him and mewled into his mouth.

She flushed down to the neck of her dress.

“Yes, well, maybe…” She inspected her ring closely. “But you didn’t have to take all morning about it.”

The doors opened. “ _Please watch your step as you exit_.”

He turned and caught her eyes. His smirk cinched the scarred half of his face.

“Yes I did.”

He stepped out first, then took her hand and guided her over the threshold onto the corrugated durasteel.

The clear plexiplastic walls of the long walkway were lined on either side by a single file of Stormtroopers. Their salutes rippled down the rows like a silent echo as he passed by with his bride.

By now, he was so accustomed to cutting his loping gait to accommodate her mincing pace that the only time he noticed was on these formal occasions, when his soldiers seemed to salute at half the speed of decay.

He glanced back over his shoulder, at the slow side-to-side swish of her heart-shaped ass under her tight dress, and twitched his lips to hide a smirk.

_Worth it._

“Oh God, there he is,” she whispered. “He looks seriously pissed off.”

As predicted, the General was standing on the bridge deck. His hands were clasped behind his back, chin raised at a near forty-five degree angle, with a disparaging glower that could cut through diamond-glass.

Noticeably absent from his side was Captain Phasma. Apparently, she had decided to spare herself the spectacle.

Ren envied her enormously.

“I hate how… passive-aggressive he gets,” Rey was muttering, more to herself than at him, “Offering to reset my watch to _standard military time_.” She huffed. “He knows I don’t wear one with all this… frippery.”

He hummed his agreement. “I had noticed you have a special place in his disregard.” He looked down at her. “I’ll kill him, if you ask me to.”

He was perfectly sincere.

“You’re sweet-”

Her words warmed him to the marrow.

“But honestly I’m the least of his problems. Did you know Colonel Holstead is having an affair with Hux’s secretary? His _married_ secretary? And that they meet three times a week, in _Hux’s office_? For _sex_?” she sounded thoroughly scandalized.

“Why, Rey of Jakku,” he smirked down at her, “what a little gossip you are.”

“The Colonel kept remembering it over and over during our debrief on tribal conflicts in the Felucian forests. Ugh, so disgusting. He’s like a hundred years old-”

He covered his mouth with his fist and coughed to keep from cawing.

“-and you know what a prude Hux is, he’ll shit porglettes when he finds out about it.”

The image almost undid him. He had to call on the Darkness to center himself as they drew towards the end of the walkway.

“You do keep asking for a pet,” he remarked as dryly as he could.

She snickered.

“Is something humorous to you, Your Majesty?” The General asked primly, now that they had finally fallen within firing range. If possible, his nose rose even higher into the air. “Do you find tardiness a hilarity?”

She bristled.

Ren chose to defuse him with a version of the truth. “Relax, General. There was an issue with the plumbing in our refresher.”

Rey’s lips pursed.

The General’s face contorted in confusion. “I’m sorry, the plumbing?”

“Yes. One of the pipes was knocking-”

“Knocking?”

“Yes, knocking. Very vigorously,” he deadpanned. He positioned himself smoothly so that Hux wouldn’t see the silent shake in Rey’s shoulders. “It required Her Majesty’s immediate attention-”

“Her Majesty’s immediate attention?”

“Goddamn it, General, is there an echo in here?” he snapped, showing his teeth.

That was sufficient motivation for the General to move on. He cleared his throat.

“Well, you’ll be… pleased to know that our honored guests have arrived,” he said _honored guests_ in the tone he normally reserved for _apostatizing dissidents_. “They’ve deplaned and should be on the bridge at any moment.”

“Thank you, General.”

As he turned with his wife to face the doors to the service lift from the hanger, he noticed her reach up and fiddle with her headdress.

“You’re nervous,” he murmured in her ear. His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Why?”

“I’m not nervous,” she hissed, even as her hand smoothed her gown in an anxious loop. “If anyone _should_ be nervous, it’s you.”

He sneered. “Why in the Galaxy should I be nervous?”

“Maybe because you resurrected her father’s evil Empire, destroyed her army, and forced her last hope for a free Republic to marry you?” She glanced up at him through her lashes. “And you killed her husband.”

He smirked.

“Correction, they were never married-”

She snorted, “You’re unbelievable-”

He raised his chin. “And conviction is the heart of a clear conscious.”

“More like delusion,” she muttered.

Below them, the lift’s gears ground to life.

Her hand tightened on his arm.

“I don’t think I can do this,” she whispered.

“Too late now.”

“Kylo, I mean it.” Her breath hitched. Fear flooded her aura. “I don’t think I can bear it if-”

Adrenaline tingled in the tips of his fingers. On reflex, his hand drifted over his saber.

_What is she trying to say?_

“Rey?”

“You have to promise me-” her voice shook. Her eyes were on the seam of the doors. “That no matter what happens, you won’t let me go.”

She looked at him. So full of conflict. Of fear.

“Promise me.”

Just like that, the tension dropped out of his shoulders. His hand fell away from his holster.

“Oh, my darling." He gave her a tender, savage smile. "There was never a possibility.”

She exhaled and nodded.

As the doors slid open, her body sagged against his side.

A woman stepped out.

She was dressed in plain grey robes and wore simple jewelry. Her soft grey hair was styled into the smooth, elegant shape worn by Alderaanian matrons. Her aura resonated with regal grace.

He met her eyes.

Eyes that were the same as his own.

“Mother.”

A crooked grin twisted his gnarled face.

“On behalf of Her Majesty-”

He glanced down at his wife. She was pale as a ghost and shaking.

“Welcome to our home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, sweet baby Rey. Don't you do it. Don't you fall for that man, Rey!  
> ____________________________________________________________________
> 
> Ok y'all, I'm trying **really** hard to finish within 28 chapters. I truly am. I understand as a reader who frustrating it is when the author meanders self-indulgently. 
> 
> However....
> 
> I can't help myself. **throws up hands** I don't know what's happening. I never have this problem. I just... can't stop making them fuck and laugh and have fluff.
> 
> I promise to GOD, we are getting to a point. With like, drama and content and motifs. We're just gonna... wade through a little smut and fluff first.
> 
> Or a lot of smut and fluff. Or this whole story is going to be smattered with smut and fluff.
> 
> Stick with me, though. It'll be worth it?


	16. Mama, We All Go To Hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set four months before...

His mother's faithful mongrel reared back and snarled. “This is _shaak shit_.”

He slammed his cybernetic fist into the table. The outworn prosthetic glitched and sparked.

One by one, he stared down his comrades around the table.

The last of the Resistance.

“Are we really going to do this?” He jabbed his remaining hand at Ren. “Sell her to this- this- whatever the _fuck_ he is.”

“How dare you!” General Hux shot off of the empty ammunitions crate he'd commandeered for a chair. His face was as red as his hair, he sprayed spit with every word. “ _You_ , insolent scum-”

Ren raised his hand.

“General, please.” His casual entreat came dark and distorted through the speech grate of his mask. “Let the Commander continue.”

He smirked.

“It’s extremely entertaining.”

“You-” The mongrel lunged for him. “Fucking sadist-”

In a flash of quicksilver, Captain Phasma whirled up from her place at Ren’s right. Her Z6 riot baton snapped open, its laser bands igniting with a violent hiss. The loud crackle of converting ions and the stench of burnt ozone filled the bunker.

“Sit down, dog,” she moved into an offensive strike, “Or be struck down where you stand.”

General Organa warbled, “Commander Dameron, stand down!"

Colorless and panic-stricken, she hauled herself up by the table's edge. “That’s an order! _Commander_ -”

Laser light danced in the mongrel’s bedeviled eyes as his lips curled back over his teeth. He flashed Phasma a feral grin. “Come on, cunt. It’s you and me.”

Behind his mask, Ren’s sneer widened with lust.

“Captain Phasma, take his other arm.”

The baton revolved in her hands, trailing blue-white light in its wake. “With pleasure, My Lord.”

The mongrel spread out in a fighter’s stance, cybernetic arm leading. He cracked his neck, thumbed his nose. “Let’s light it up, bitch.”

Organa screamed, “No!”

“Stop it! Everyone _stop_!”

Ren sensed the blast coming before it hit the combatants, sending them sliding apart.

At the opposite end of the table, Rey’s hand strained out toward them.

With her other arm, she held up his wilting mother. Rey’s teeth were bared, her eyes shone wet in the low light of the grease lamp above. She was shaking.

Naked desire cracked across Ren’s gut like a whip.

_There’s the last little Jedi._

“Stop it, all of you,” she pleaded. “The fighting’s over. It’s done.”

She implored the mongrel. “Poe, _please_. It’s done.”

His jaw clenched. He sank into his seat and slumped.

The defeat in his soul was electrifying. Ren drank it in like ambrosia.

Across the table, Rey met his eyes through his visor.

“What’s left?” she spat.

_Only everything, beloved._

He stood.

The former Resistance leaders flinched and cowered as he came for her around the table.

_Cravens and cowards, all of them._

His mother shrank back as well, not from fear, but under the weight of the horror that flooded her aura. Her eyes sought his through his visor as she sagged further and further towards the floor.

_Look all you want, Mother. You won’t find him in me._

_Han Solo can't save you now._

“My darling boy,” she whispered as he loomed over them. “What have you become?”

“What I am destined to be.”

His hand stretched back towards General Hux. Phasma’s laser baton sizzled close by.

The General handed him a tablet and stylus.

Willing his hands not to shake with excitement, Ren offered them to his bride.

“Sign it.”

She raised her chin. “I can’t.” 

“Oh?” His eyes narrowed. The tablet creaked, threatening to snap in his furious grip.

He hissed, “And why is that?”

“Because-” her voice cracked. She lifted her chin higher still. “Because I can’t write.”

An image flashed across his mind, of a lonely, starved little girl adrift in the desert.

A savage wave of tenderness swept over him.

She snorted bitterly. "Some queen you've chosen."

Behind him, Hux muttered, "I could not agree more..." 

Ren raised his hand, and the General slammed into a wall.

"I’ll help you," he murmured through his mask.

Faster than she could react, he swept his swooning mother out of her grasp. "Captain Phasma."

The mongrel leapt to his feet, snarling.

Ren deposited his mother with the Captain and crowded in on his bride, relishing her full-bodied flinch as he caught and curled her right hand over the stylus and reached around her with the tablet.

Enveloped in his dark embrace, she trembled. He couldn’t tell which was more arousing – the feel of her soft, young body pressed up against his, or the fear waxing through her aura.

The Darkness inside him pulsed with anticipation.

_Soon._

With her hand shaking violently in his, he pressed the stylus to the tablet and nuzzled his speech grate against her ear.

“Rey of Jakku,” he murmured as he wrote it, taking his time to show her each letter.

She quaked so hard her teeth chattered.

The things he would teach his little girl...

He signed his name below hers.

_Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order._

“Now it’s done.”

She clapped her hand over a sob as he released her.

“I will return in two days."

He tipped up her chin with his gloved finger.

His beautiful, beautiful bride.

“Miss me, Rey.”

He reveled in the sick, stricken looks on the faces around the table as the General picked himself up off the floor.

Most especially, the mongrel’s.

“Congratulate yourselves, all of you.” A malevolent grin wormed its way through his mask. “You've just paid for your lives.”

He told his Captain and the General, “Let’s go.”

The last thing he heard as he stepped out of the ramshackle bunker into the dust-hazed, moonless night was the mongrel’s baleful howls.

As he reached his ship's ramp, he felt a familiar signature.

He turned and looked out across the dry, flat hardscape.

On a small ridge in the distance, a man's silhouette stood out against the stars.

“That's him, isn’t it?”

Captain Phasma stood beside him, her retracted riot baton in hand.

“It's FN-2187.”

“Yes.” Ren saw him as clearly as if they stood feet apart.

The traitor's fury roiled across the distance.

Ren’s aura roared in response.

_Wait._

The Darkness whispered.

_It is not yet time._

Phasma's baton ignited.

“No, Captain. Not yet.”

“But My Lord-”

“A quick execution in the desert is too good for him. When we kill him, I want to watch the hope leave his eyes. I want to taste his defeat.”

Through their connection forged by fire, he felt Phasma's satisfaction at his reply.

She retracted her rod.

“Come, Captain. Now is not the time for revenge.”

His smirked seeped through his mask.

“We have a wedding to prepare for.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw, Kylo, you cutie-patootie! He threw Rey an engagement party! Look at him, making such an effort to get to know her friends, and really making his mother feel included, too. What a guy, I tell yah.
> 
> **sighs dreamily**
> 
> Hey, don't look at me like that. This is what you came for ;)
> 
> Alsooooo, please excuse the mask play. I am an OG Vader groupie, and I want Daddy to tell me I'm a bad little Jedi through that speech grate. **shivers**


	17. Mama Said Knock You Out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, the camp. The ridiculous fucking camp. 
> 
> Anyway, as one of my gorgeous readers once commented, "Talk shit, get hit." 
> 
> Mamma Leia's not here for the bullshit.

Rey breathed, “Leia.”

“Your Majesty.” His mother’s tender smile creased the corners of her eyes. She came forward slowly, leaning heavily on slim, white cane.

Rey pressed into his side, trembling. Her breath stuttered, she gripped his arm like a vice.

His mother reached out to her, fingers unfurling slowly, like the petals of a flower. Her palm was smooth and pale.

Rey hesitated.

Like a frightened bird, her hand warbled in the space between them, halting and hovering before it landed shaking inside his mother’s.

The lines love etched around his mother’s eyes deepened. She closed her fingers around his wife’s hand and brought her others to cover them.

“My h-husband and I are so pleased you could come,” Rey faltered. “We- I- I’ve missed you, so much-” her voice cracked and broke.

With gentle grace, his mother unwound her from his arm and gathered her into a deep embrace.

Memories flooded his mind, fast and too bright to look at without hurting, so he only glanced.

His mother’s face, young and beautiful and smiling. Her warm breath on his cheek. The specks of gold in her irises. Her laugh. The press of her lips to his small, moist mouth. 

_Benjamin-boy. My darling, darling Benjamin-boy._

She stroked Rey’s hair. The strands of crystals woven through it tinkled softly, and he remembered the pretty dancer in his mother's music box. The one he coveted so badly as a boy.

She told Rey, “You’ve been on my heart every day. Every single day.”

Rey clung onto her tighter, and they rocked together.

A strange emotion sparked inside his gut. Something tender and mangling.

From the base of his skull, the Darkness whispered.

_My son is dead._

The feeling flickered and went out.

“Here-” His mother stepped back and held Rey gently at arm’s length. Her fingertips soothed away the tears that dripped down Rey’s cheeks. “Let me look at you, my dear. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen you.”

Pride and indignation crowded out the air in his lungs as she gave his wife a careful once-over. His lips curled back over his teeth.

_Go on, take a good, hard look. See how I’ve cared for her? Lavished upon her? How I've saved her from your filth and your famine? Do you see, Mother, how she’s flourished in my love?_

“You look... radiant. There's a glow about you.” She touched the jewels that hung down Rey's neck. “Royalty suits you.”

His chest swelled.

Flushing, Rey snorted. “I look like a scavenger in a queen’s costume.”

“Nonsense. My father was a junk-trader’s slave, and he almost ruled the Galaxy.”

“Darth Vader was a junk-slave?” Rey’s voice was hardly a whisper.

From the outskirts of their reunion, the General blustered, “Blasphemy!”

Ren raised his chin. “While you are a guest on this ship, I’ll thank you not to poison my wife with your rebel propaganda, _Mother_.”

“Forgive me, Supreme Leader Ren.” She meet his cool glare calmly. “I didn't realize history was so offensive to you. Can we at least agree that you and I share a partiality towards diamonds-in-the-rough?”

Her eyebrow quirked. “Or have you convinced yourself in this little macabre fairytale you’ve spun that you were born of a virgin, like your grandfather?”

“Oh believe me,” his voice was dangerously soft, “The last thing I have delusions about is your virtue.”

Rey gasped, “ _Kylo!_ ”

“Speaking of inappropriate liaisons,” he sniffed, “Where’s the pilot?”

His mother looked completely nonplussed. “Commander Dameron is with the ship.”

“Poe is here?” The hope in Rey’s warble rankled him.

_Had she fucked for the pilot, too?_

Jealousy spiked through his ribs and grounded in his gut, lighting up his aura with a web of dark, vermillion fissures.

His mother noticed. She told Rey airily, “He’s down in the hanger, repairing the ventilation system. Something to do with the oscillator. He assures me it’s nothing he can’t fix before our departure, but he doesn’t think he’ll have time to come up.”

Ren's jaw clenched.

_So the mongrel thinks he can snub me, does he?_

_Coward._

“The oscillator?” Rey chirped.

She tried to peer past the Stormtroopers and poly-glass into the hanger below. “I scavenged dozens of those on Jakku- hundreds, probably. I could help-”

“ _Your Majesty_ -” General Hux gasped, as Ren snapped, “Absolutely not.”

He bore down on a snarl. “You won’t go near that ship.”

Indignation twisted her beautiful face. “Wha- you- who are you talking to?”

“You, Rey of Jakku.” His eye twitched. He consciously unclenched his fists. “I am talking to _you_.”

His mother tried cutting in, soothing and soft, “That’s extremely generous, Your Majesty-”

Rey glowered at him. “It’s _Rey_.”

She raised her chin in challenge. “Just. Rey.”

His nostrils flared.

He warned her, low and dark, “Don’t.”

“Or what?”

He pushed an image at her, of her pretty gown torn in two by her feet and his hand around her throat as he fucked her with abandon.

She sneered coolly. “Sith, please.”

The Darkness cackled.

“I mean it, Rey-"

He shoved another image, of her on her knees, back arched, his fist wrapped around her hair, whining like a bitch in heat as he fucked into her from behind.

"Don’t test me.”

She slapped the same image back at him, only this time, he was wearing his mask, and she was whimpering helplessly, breathlessly, _Lord Vader-_

 _"Fuck_ ,” he snarled.

She smirked.

His hands were shaking. He saw his wild expression in her wide, pretty eyes. “You… make me fucking crazy-”

“Me?” She snorted softly. “You were a raving lunatic when we _met_.”

He slammed her with one last image, of her dress bunched under her breasts and shoved up over her hips, and his head buried between her thighs.

“Be sweet, Kylo,” she was so close he could feel her breath on his face as she whispered, “And I’ll beg you to.”

She played the image back with her soft, mewling pleading.

He stopped breathing.

"Rey-"

“Ah-hem.”

They both looked.

One of Rey’s hands was on his chest, over his thrashing heart, as the other curled around his nape, her fingers threaded through his hair, coaxing him closer. Her lips were parted, she was flushed and trembling the way she did when he loved her.

His blood hammered. He rasped for breath, holding her ass in a hard, two-handed grip.

In his periphery, he saw General Hux was as red as his hair. His head strained so far towards the opposite direction Ren thought his neck would snap. His jaw ticked steadily.

His mother folded her hands in front of her and drew a mild look between them. “Goodness.”

“Get off of me-” Rey balked and twisted away from him as if he were on fire. She looked equal parts sick and furious. “Leia, I- I’m so sorry for this-this- _animal_.”

A smirk wrung the rent half of his face as he looked at her. “Yeah, sure.”

“Not at all, my dear.” His mother clucked comfortingly. She pressed the back of her hand against Rey’s flushed cheek. “You know, his father and I fought like cats and dogs. It made our love-making very intense-”

He hissed as if she'd slapped him. “ _Mother._ ” 

Rey clapped her hand over her mouth.

“In fact, I’m positive Supreme Leader Ren was conceived in the heat of an argument. A fruit of passion, if you will. I’ve always wondered if that in-part explains his tempestuous nature.” She smoothed a rumple in Ren’s gown. “Even as a boy, he was desperately romantic.”

General Hux looked to the ceiling and muttered, "For the love of what's holy..."

Ren gritted his teeth, “That. is. enough.”

“Oh, forgive an old woman for getting sentimental.”

She tucked Rey’s had into the crook of her elbow. “Come, I want to see this your apartment of yours.”

Rey floundered. “Wha- I- but the meeting-”

“Our conference isn’t for another hour, and I want to see everything there is to see. Give me the grand tour.” Her eyes met his as she told Rey, “You’re the lady of this ship. That makes it your home.”

“Lady? Well, I- I mean,” Rey looked to him helplessly, “Kylo-”

“King Kylo can mind himself.” His mother gave her hand a reassuring pat-pat and started down the walkway. “Now, tell me all about the upcoming tour of the reservations. The first stop is the Vizrothi reservation, isn’t it? Oh, that will be very exciting, the Vizrothis are a fascinating people-”

A peculiar amalgam of emotions whirled inside him as he watched his wife and mother walk arm-in-arm past lines of Stormtroopers through his ship. The two of them looked so soft and small against the backdrop of steel and power. It hurt in a way he wasn’t sure he disliked.

When they reached the elevators, Rey looked back at him.

They held each other's gaze until she stepped into the carriage.

“Go with them,” he told General Hux. “Make sure she doesn’t burn down my ship.”

The General sniffed dryly. “Which one, My Lord?”

Ren looked into the empty space in front of the elevator. “I’m not sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh the comments. I am looking forward to these comment.
> 
> Btw, you know who I feel sorry for in all of this? I mean, besides Rey. Obviously Rey. But also, Huuuuuuux. Dude, your boss is **whack**. You should put in your two-weeks...
> 
> Also **squints** does anyone else get the feeling Leia ships this sick pair as much as we do?! ;)


	18. Whose House?   Ren's House.

Inside the service lift, Ren leaned back against the naked durasteel and rubbed at the ache behind his eyes.

This time yesterday, he was sitting on the sectional in his cool, quiet apartment, underlining the words on his tablet with his fingertip as Rey tried to read them aloud. Watching the small space between her brows furrow and her eyes squint softly as she concentrated intensely on making each sound.

_“It is… the t-time… you have wah-waay-"_

_"Wasted-"_

_"Wasted… on your r-rr-roh-ses… that mah-makes… your r-roses… s-so… eyem-eyem-eyempoor-”_ She looked at his mouth.

He showed her slowly, _“Im-por-tant."_

 _“Im-por-tant- oh, important!”_ She picked up his hand and pointed him at the beginning. _“It is the time... you have wah-wasted on your r-roses... that makes your roses s-so… important.”_

 _“Very good."_ He felt her broad smile in the soft tissue around his organs and the spaces between his ribs.

Her glorying faded to bemusement. _"But what does it mean? Why would wasting time make roses more important?”_   She tipped up her chin to look at him. Her eyes were starbright. _"And what_ are _roses?”_

Unable to bear it, he'd kissed her and kissed her and kissed her more.

He pressed harder against his eyes as the lift lurched to a halt.

_What has she brought on us?_

His mother’s mongrel was exactly where she said he’d be, lying on a short steel scaffold under the belly of an ancient transporter. The service door to the craft was open, his cybernetic prosthetic was winding a wrench inside its guts.

Below the scaffolding, his companion droid beeped a warning. And beside it-

“Master Solo!”

His mother’s protocol bot scuttled forward on the fronts of its flat feet. It cocked its head sideways and studied him, its intake sockets dilating like the eyes of a big brass bird. “My, how malignant you look, sir.”

“C-3,” Ren greeted him dryly, though his tone was not without a shade of fondness.

As a boy, C-3PO was often his only company.

“That’s no Solo,” the mongrel’s voice came strained and growling from above as he applied more torque to his wrench. “That’s Supreme Leader Kylo Ren.”

He said _Supreme Leader_ like _cocksucker_.

His prosthetic slipped, the wrench skipped the bolt and fell out of his grasp onto the hanger deck below.

“Son of a porg fucker-” He rolled to the edge of the scaffolding.

“Oh do forgive me, Master Ren,” C-3PO anxiously rearranged its arms. “My greetings program is not set to process malevolent alter-egos.”

Ren snorted.

The mongrel jumped and landed hard on the durasteel beside his BB-unit. His dark eyes burned, the desire for revenge crackled through his miniscule aura in a way that reminded Ren of the static electricity in laundered socks.

He smirked. “Pilot.”

“Supreemo.” The mongrel pulled a rag out of his jumper with his prosthetic. “New mask?”

He jerked his chin at Ren’s face as he wrung the rag around his remaining hand. “It’s a hellava lot uglier than the last one.”

 _Enemy_ , hissed the Dark.

It coiled low in his gut and rattled.

_He carries the Light._

Adrenaline sparked in Ren’s fingertips as his aura ignited with violence.

He smiled, all teeth and no warmth. “Won’t you join the women in the North Tower?”

“Thanks,” the mongrel returned his mocking sneer with one in kind, “But I’d rather slam my cock in a drawer.”

Ren leaned against the transport’s landing gear. “You’re sure?”

His grin sharpened.

“My wife would love to see you.”

The mongrel’s sneer slipped off his face. He threw down his rag and stepped in, fists clenched, baring his teeth.

“She’s not your wife,” he snarled. “You delusional fuck.”

C-3PO balked, “Oh my.”

Ren’s hand drifted over his saber hilt, reasoning that Rey would forgive him for the mongrel’s death eventually. He'd even let her keep the little BB unit as a consolation-

A presence, cold and unyielding, materialized inside the hanger.

“Captain Phasma.”

She stepped out of the shadows, glinting like moonlit silver under the bright lights. She was flanked by six troopers, each bearing a Z6 riot baton.

The tip of her quicksilver battle staff was aimed explicitly at the mongrel’s heart. “Commander Dameron.”

The mongrel nodded. “Cunt.”

Ren told his troops, “This three-legged dog belongs to my mother. Take it to her. I want it out of my hanger.”

“And the droids, sir?”

“The little one’s a thief. Put it down in Repairs and remove its power cell-”

The BB-unit chirped and clicked manically.

“What, _no-_ ” Growling, the mongrel made to rush for his companion, but was intercepted by troopers.

“The Commander can have it back when he leaves.” Ren cupped his chin in his glove as he considered C-3PO. He decided, “The protocol bot can go with them. Her Majesty will find him amusing.”

“Thank you, sir.” C-3PO looked down at the sputtering BB-unit. “Well don’t look at me. You brought this on yourself.”

The mongrel continued to scramble, howling uselessly as the troopers led him and the droids away.

When they'd disappeared behind the closing lift doors, Ren stepped back and studied the transporter.

The Captain collapsed her battle rod. “Is he here?”

Closing his eyes, Ren raised his hand.

He saw inside the transporter.

He looked inside the hull first, searching every crack and crevice, as if he were inside the ship. Next he checked the cockpit, the undercarriage, and the duct system. He even looked inside the wings where they connected to the body of the craft. There, they were wide enough that a man could stow away if he laid flat.

He circled slowly around the craft, his senses expanding outward like concentric circles, searching for a signature until he was satisfied there was none.

He opened his eyes.

“No. He’s not.”

Disappointment roiled off of Phasma in boiling waves.

“He will come. It’s only a matter of time.” He heard the hard click as she ground her bolted jaw. “Self-righteous insubordination is the glitch in his programming.”

He tried not to picture the handsome, dark face of the traitor who’d fucked his wife.

If he could go back in time, he would rip out the traitor’s heart and splatter it across the desert.

He turned. “Did you bring the scanner?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Captain placed a small metal device in the palm of his outstretched hand. “This microwave scanner is calibrated to detect Her Majesty’s nano-tracers up to a single system span away.”

He switched on the terminal.

The screen blinked to life. A two-second lag, and a small red dot blipped against a grid. After that, another short delay, then a read-out of the blip’s galactic coordinates scrolled across the bottom of the screen. He recognized the location as his ship’s current position.

“A single system span?”

There were hundreds of systems in his galaxy, and galaxies beyond his own. If her abductor jumped systems, it could take him weeks to find her. Months, if her captor was clever.

And most of his enemies were.

“Yes, sir. Beyond that, free-floating microwaves cause too much interference to pinpoint a location.”

He frowned at the blip blinking as steadily as a heartbeat. “Can the signal strength be increased?”

“At two million parts, the nanoparticles carrying the microwave encryption through her bloodstream are perfectly harmless,” she explained, “but if her body were to become oversaturated, the particles could trigger an immune response.”

His teeth bared at the thought. “Unacceptable-”

“Obviously. Sir-” she paused for patience. “You wanted a tracking implant that was undetectable and irremovable. There were tradeoffs.”

“Tradeoffs,” he repeated.

_So much for being Supreme Leader of the Galaxy._

“Might I suggest you not misplace her to begin with?”

He snorted. “You might.”

“I’m curious,” her helmet tilted ever-so-slightly, “How _did_ you administer the nanoparticles without her consent?”

His eyebrow arched. “Why do you assume she wouldn’t consent?”

It was the Captain's turn to snort. “Her rebel spirit would never agree to be collared.”

He knew it was a disparagement, but her deduction made him feel strangely proud.

“It’s not a collar, Captain, it’s a precaution.” A sly smirk cinched his scar. “But if you must know, she took the injection as part of an inoculation panel, for your upcoming tour.”

“You told her it was a vaccine.” She considered it. “Plausible.”

That was as close to a compliment as Captain Phasma came.

The Darkness insisted vehemently.

_But it is a vaccine. Truly, it is._

“Come.” He called her towards the lift. “We’re due in the North Tower for a _consultation._ ” The idea reeked like shaak shit on his boots. “With my mother.”

As the lift lurched upwards, she mused distantly, “I never knew my mother, but if I did, I’m positive I would despise her.”

A vicious affection touched the corners of his eyes. He smirked at the seam of the doors. “I’m convinced a volcano spat you out.”

He felt a rare rush of pleasure through their connection. “Thank you, sir.”

“By the way,” he looked at her, “did you know Colonel Holstead is having an affair with General Hux’s secretary?”

“I did.”

“Any thoughts on how we can use that to our advantage?”

He heard her sharp smile. “Actually, several.”

“Good." He motioned for her to step out first onto the bridge deck. "Tell me while we walk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every Maverick needs his Goose, and Captain Phasma makes one hell of a wingman. 
> 
> But who will Ren pick when he's forced to choose between his ride-or-die righthand commander and his moralistic child bride? They say, "Happy wife, happy life", but... would you want to be on Phas's bad side?
> 
> Also, what's a Star Wars fic without some C-3PO shade? :>
> 
> Aaaand, if you can guess what book Rey is learning to read from, **without** using Le Google, I'll give you five-and-a-half Gold Stars.


	19. You Know It's Hard Out Here For A Sith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pastel, you dramatic-ass bitch.

“Supreme Leader.”

General Hux was waiting for them at elevators. He gave a crisp salute.

“General.” Ren waited for the Captain to exit before he stepped out. “Are our guests comfortable?”

Hands clasped behind his back, the General added his elegant march behind Ren’s wide, loping gait and alongside the Captain’s clanging stomp. “I’ve placed them in the smallest conference room, as you requested.”

His jaw twitched with triumph. “Her Majesty was most aggrieved.”

“The command room is for discussing serious affairs of State.” They turned the corner in tight v-formation. Ren’s cape swelled out behind him like a black tide. “This is a joke.”

Uneasiness niggled at his gut.

He ignored it.

As they passed, the lights swept over Captain Phasma’s armor in blue-white bands. “Do you have a plan of attack, sir?”

_As a matter of fact-_

“I do. General Hux,” Ren glanced back over his left, “you’ll take the Commander-”

The General’s gleeful smile was all gleaming teeth and malice. “With relish, sir.”

If anyone could blow more self-righteous smoke than the mongrel, it was Hux.

Ren’s chin angled right. “Captain Phasma-”

“My Lord?”

“You take Her Majesty.”

Her helmet turned towards him. “She’s your wife.”

“Exactly. She won’t take anything seriously from the man who eats her pussy twice a week.”

The General choked as the Captain asked dubiously, “Only twice?”

Ren tossed back a feral smirk. “What she lacks in experience, she makes up for in frothy emotional appeal. Her weakness is in her reasoning, she has no defense for her positions other than _following her heart_. Draw her false logic out into the open and she’ll finish the argument for you.”

“You really are better suited, sir,” the Captain observed mildly.

“Yes,” he murmured. Resentment towards his mother seethed in his gut. “But I’d prefer not to humiliate her.”

_I love her._

“Understood.”

The conference room was straight ahead.

The Darkness hissed, _Interlopers. They want to take our Light._

_Over my cold, dead kyber._

“No quarter, no prisoners.”

At the door, he turned to his officers. “Let’s remind them who won the war.”

 

 

 

 

“Ugh, this is useless!”

At the far end of the table, his wife crossed her arms on the tabletop and buried her face.

He heard her muffled mewling, “We’ve been talking in circles for hours.”

True to form, The Last Little Jedi had charged into battle teeth bared and saber blazing, mantled in the belief that sheer righteous fury would force her opponent into submission. Now, after hours of the Captain’s careful and relentless parrying, Rey had thrashed herself into exhaustion. All the symptoms that were by now so familiar to him were there – the sloping shoulders and heavy eyelids, a drifting and unfocused gaze. Her speech had startled to jumble, she kept losing her place mid-sentence, her voice sounding softer and younger by the second.

His Darkness slavered and whined, wanting her closer, tucked in at his side, safe behind his menace and the rending arc of his saber, where it could kneel between her soft thighs and lap her wounds with its thick, black tongue.

 _Naked,_ it snarled and paced. _She is naked without us. Danger danger danger danger-_

Ren propped his elbows and rubbed his eyes.

On the other side of his mother, the mongrel wasn’t fairing much better. He fumed silently, pushed back from the table with knees wide apart, his remaining arm crossed with his robotic prosthetic over his chest. His dark eyes burned, he dug at the sides of his ribs with his fists.

Yet his mother remained unshaken. She sat at the head with her hands folded benignly in front of her.

She was calm when she spoke, “I honestly don’t see what the problem is, Supreme Leader Ren. We’re only suggesting that you allow a very small, very limited group of representatives from the reservations to work in tandem with your administration to resolve their grievances.”

“I see,” his voice was deliberately soft. “You’re only suggesting I sanction a senate. Tell me, Mother-”

He came forward slowly, stacking his hands.

“Are you familiar with the meaning of _autocracy_? Or,” he made an open gesture, “ _Supreme_. Because I don’t think you understand what it is you’ve come here to parlay.”

“I do understand.” Her mock-sadness annoyed him. “I understand perfectly.”

He sat back. “Then you know you’re wasting my time.”

Rey’s head snapped up. “ _Kylo_.”

He suppressed a sigh. “Your Majesty? Something you’d like to add?”

“Yes,” she spat. She looked equal parts furious and elated to be facing him and not Captain Phasma. “I’m so sick of your- your mean, miserable bullying-” her lips curled back over her teeth.

He hadn’t seen her so incensed since their wedding day.

Which reminded him, wasn’t their fourth month anniversary coming up? He thought there might be some rule on the type of gift he should give her. Diamond-glass, or plexi-plastic, maybe. He should ask the General privately, he kept up with that kind of etiquette.

“- are so disrespectful-”

Or maybe he’d commission a new necklace. As much as she liked to whine about her queen’s clothes, he’d seen her wander her closet on more than one occasion, touching her dresses and jewels in silent wonder. She was partial to the color green, he’d noticed. But she did also look magnificent in red.

And black.

And purple.

Force help him, she was too beautiful.

“- had to beg your only mother to consult on this- this ridiculous _fiefdom_ -”

_Fiefdom?_

His lips twitched.

_She’s been spending too much time with Hux._

“- acting like a stupid, arrogant asshole.” She slapped the table. “Kylo! _Are you listening to me_?”

The look he gave her was darkly affectionate. “No.”

She pulled her headdress and snarled.

His mother rubbed her arm. “Rey, my dear, you can’t let him get under your skin-”

He snorted.

_Too late for that._

“Your Majesty,” the Captain addressed her from his right.

His wife winced. “Yes, Captain?”

Ren’s hand ghosted over the table to hover near her arm.

_Gently, Phasma. She is your Queen, and my beloved._

Her answer emerged on the black, placid surface of her mind. _Understood._

“If I may,” she began, “Today we’ve spoken of, as you’ve put it, a _forum_ by which grievances from dissidents of the State may be brought for consideration.”

Rey glanced suspiciously between him and the Captain. “Yes…”

“It was my impression,” the Captain continued, “that the primary role of Her Majesty on the reservations tour was to serve as impartial oversight on behalf of the aggrieved refugees-”

“Honestly, Captain,” his mother’s weary sigh cut in, “Rey can hardly be considered impartial.” She gestured to him. “She is literally married to this regime-”

“Forgive me, Lady Organa, but my question was to Her Majesty.” A deferent pause.

Rey braced herself. “Yes, Captain? Go on.”

“I seek only to understand how a forum is necessary when Your Majesty is already taking time and attention away from her royal and conjugal duties to oversee what is categorially considered by this government as simple civil dissidence,” the Captain’s neutral tone never wavered. “His Maleficence, the Supreme Leader, is already sacrificing a gracious indulgence on behalf of Her Majesty’s personal happiness, at great expense to both himself and to the many affairs which depend upon Her Majesty’s involvement, for the benefit of none but rabble-rousers and subversives.”

Across the table, Rey’s eyes were wide. Her hands shook, he could see the labored rise and fall of her breathing. “Wha- I. Captain, that- that’s not really your place-”

“As a servant of the Supreme Leader and of this administration, I am bound by my duty to ask the question that His Malevolence in his besetment cannot. How is any request for an additional allowance not only redundant, but also an abuse of your privileges?”

Rey stared down at her ring.

“My privileges,” she echoed.

Grief moved like a shadow across her aura.

She leaned in on her elbows. Her hands covered her eyes. “God, I’m so stupid.”

Her soft sob tore at the tissue around his heart. He saw her face, slack and peaceful as she slept in his arms, and snarled.

 _Hush, little one,_ soothed the Darkness. _Dearest little one._

_Come away from the Light._

His fists clenched until his gloves creaked. “No, you are not stupid. My mother is a scheming, manipulative snake.”

The mongrel growled, “Watch it.”

But Ren was beyond caring. Later, he’d reach deep down the man’s throat and rip out his spine. He’d scattered his craven guts across his Galaxy.

Right now, he had only one true enemy.

“ _You_ ,” he hissed at his mother. “ _You_ , come here, onto my ship, to put my wife up to asking me for something you know I’ll never give you. You pitted her against me, knowing this was exactly what would happen. You _wanted_ this. To hurt her. So that you could hurt me. This is about revenge.”

“Supreme Leader Ren,” his mother beseeched him quietly. “I didn’t come here to cause strife-”

He snorted, a bitter, vicious sound.

“I know you don’t believe me, but I came here to help you.” She laid open hands.

The gesture enraged him.

“ _No_ ,” he said, with soft, deadly force. “You’re using her against me, because I destroyed you. You’re here to twist the only knife that hurts.”

He looked at Rey, where she sat with the back of her hand pressed against her mouth, crying quietly. “My wife-”

Too thick to swallow, the rage choked him off.

He should have killed his mother years ago, and he should kill her now. Rend her in half with his saber and feed her falsely pitying eyes to crows.

His mother smoothed at her forehead and tried, “Supreme Leader-”

“No. You’re using her like a weapon, exactly like you did before. Over and over, you sent out this little girl, untrained, untested, with a broken kyber crystal, to defeat me. And when she couldn’t, when she wasn’t _useful_ to you anymore more, you sold her to me. To save yourselves.”

He raised his chin. “Call me a monster.”

His mother’s gaze faltered.

“Go on. Say it.”

The mongrel clasped his hands between his knees and hung his head.

“ _Say it_.”

 Rey’s shoulders shook harder. She sobbed in earnest.

Guilt seared his soul.

_This is my mistake. I should have never let them come._

He stood, and his aura rose with him, dark and virulent. “If you want revenge, Mother, then send out your mongrel, or your brother’s apparition, or any other of your pathetic champions. Send them all, and I will meet them.”

He bore down on a snarl. “But leave. my wife. out of it.”

After a several pounding heartbeats, his mother looked at him. He saw fear in her eyes for the first time.

“I didn’t want to come here,” she began. Her voice shook. “I didn’t want to see what my son had become. To look my own failure in the eyes. To see the face of my lover inside the soul of my father. The first time Rey asked me-”

She turned and took Rey’s hand from her lap.

Rey cried harder into her wrist.

“I said no. Because I am a coward, and I did not want to face my reckoning. But when she told me about the baby-”

She met his eyes, “I knew I had no choice but to come.”

Something cold and tingling slipped down his spine.

_But when she told me about the baby-_

_About the baby-_

_The baby-_

_Baby-_

“Baby?” His face twisted. He looked at his wife.

Her hand squeezed his mother’s so hard it turned white.

“What baby?”

His mother sighed. “Don’t be naïve, Benjamin.” He hardly noticed her use of his birth name. “It doesn’t suit you.”

He tried to speak, and couldn’t, so he wet his lips and tried again.

“Rey,” he rasped.

She looked at him. Her beautiful eyes were wet and afraid. “I’m sorry, I can’t-”

She bolted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "You're havin' my baby! You're the woman I love and I love what it's doin' to yah!"
> 
> Yes Phas, read that spoiled girl for filth!
> 
> Oh, I had to increase the number of chapters to completion, because the idea that I'd be finished in 9 more is **hilarious**.
> 
> Sorry about that.
> 
> Also, I have figured out how to give this story a happy ending. I did not think it was possible, not in a box, not with a fox. But I've figured it out, and I shall.
> 
> Oh, we're going through the meat grinder first, though. For sure. 
> 
> "The need inside you, I see it showin'. The seed inside you, baby, I see it growin'!"


	20. You Remind Me of the Babe. (What Babe?) Babe With The Power. (What Power?) Power of Voodoo. (Who do?) You do. You, Remind Me of the Babe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Korean Soap Opera, anyone? **smirks**
> 
> Please excuse any typos. I have not had a chance to go over this with a fine-tooth comb.
> 
> I'll go back over it a little later, k?

He took the corridor at a hard canter, ignoring the shake in his hands and the sharp stitch each time metal bit hip. His heart pounded in his fingertips, his breath caught high in his throat.

He looked everywhere as he called her name, “Rey.”

Up ahead, he saw her slippers on the floor, strewn apart like estranged lovers across the glossy dark.

He slid into the intersection and stopped, twisting and turning in every direction.

_Rey-_

A sound like a whisper. On his left, he caught the train of her dress slipping around the corner.

He kicked off, head and feet and heart pounding in perfect, wild synchronicity so that he hit the turn at a dead run.

She was there, directly in front of him, pressed back inside the elevator at the end of the corridor.

“Rey!”

As the doors began to close, she raised her hand.

The full impact of the blast hit him where he was broadest, across the span of his chest between his shoulders. It was enough Force to throw a man twice his size halfway across the ship.

He took it without breaking his stride.

His Darkness crowed at her wide, surprised eyes.

_Not in this century, my darling._

She scrambled for the control panel, mashing frantically to force the doors closed faster.

One swipe of his hand, and the doors slammed back into their frame with so much Force the lights in the corridor flickered.

“Kylo, stop!”

Two fast clips, and he was upon her. His heart slammed forward to meet her.

She shrieked as he caught her by the waist and plucked her out of the elevator.

He hoisted her high into the air and spun them in a circle. The long train of her gown glided behind them like the glittering tail of a comet.

“Kylo-” she breathed. Her train settled with a silvery hush as they stopped.

He lowered her a little, until she could wrap her arms around his neck and rest her forehead on top of his. He was trembling as badly as she was, but he couldn’t bear to let her go.

He would never let her go.

His beloved.

He closed his eyes. “Rey.”

Her small hands cupped his face. She touched the wetness that slipped through the corners of his eyes and down his cheeks. “Kylo-”

He kissed her.

 _Infinite,_ whispered the Great Dark.

It painted scenes across the dark expanse of his eyelids. His wife, round-bellied and smiling. An ocean. The endless span of stars across the sky. A drop of life, warm and mewing, cradled in the width of his hands.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

The Great Dark smiled.

_You are welcome._

Her thumbs strummed more wetness from his cheeks as she whispered, “You’re not mad?”

Her voice was childlike and unsure.

_Mad?_

“No,” he murmured roughly.

His throat was too thick to speak, so he told her with more soft kisses and tender nuzzles, against her nose and her cheek, willing her to hear the words through his touch.

_This is everything I’ve longed for._

_Everything I’ve dreamed of._

_Everything._

_Everything._

Her breath shook. “I thought you’d send me back.”

He opened his eyes. His tears blurred the light, haloing her face in soft, watery white. “What?”

“Because-” Her words were trembling half-whispers, so soft he could barely hear them, but each one caught like a hook into his gut. “Because who wants a scavenger’s baby?”

Her voice was bitter and raw, “I know what they think about me, Hux, a-and Phasma. I hear it in their minds. Stupid. Illiterate. Scum-”

He tried to swallow and couldn’t. “No-”

“My own parents didn’t want me,” her breath caught on a sob. “They s-sold me so they could drink-” 

He held onto her tighter. “Beloved-”

“You were r-right. About Leia, n-not wanting me anymore either. And P-Poe, he c-can’t even look at me now. I c-couldn’t save them, and they h-hate me-”

He set her bare feet on the floor so that he could gather her completely into his arms. His aura folded around them, sheltering out her grief with his own heavy sorrow.

She pressed her face against his chest. The muffled sound of her sobbing rankled his heart.

“Shh-shh-shh.” He rocked them slowly, soul tearing in two as he pressed tender, trembling kisses into her hair. “It’s ok, Rey. You’re ok."

“I can’t go back-” Her hands twisted in his uniform. She bleated, a wounded, pitiful sound. “I can’t- can’t go back- they won’t t-take me back-”

“ _Never_.” His embrace was almost brutal, but it only made her cling to him more desperately. “I will _never_ send you back. Rey, I will never.”

She choked and coughed. Her breath stuttered, she struggled to breathe.

Unable to bear it, he raised his hand.

“Rey.”

She looked up at him. Her eyes were those of a frightened, abandoned child's.

He stroked her temple.

Her body sagged. 

He dipped and caught her, watching with dark, sad eyes as she fainted into a dreamless sleep.

 

 

 

 

The train of her gown whispered softly along the floor as he carried her to their bed.

He laid her gently among the pillows. One by one, he removed her adornments and slipped off her dress.

Slowly, reverently, his big hand cupped the soft swell of her belly, where his baby lay curled up inside her, drawing its life from her warmth.

He closed his eyes, and reached out.

It was soft and faint, just a little pitter-patter, like the slap of Rey’s tiny bare feet on the tile, or the sound of her breathing as she slept tucked into his side, her head on his arm. It was quick, too, like her heartbeat after he made love to her, listening with his ear pressed against her breast as they lay panting in the afterglow.

He knelt by the bed and laid his ear to her belly. He could hear it so clearly, under the burble and thrum of her life pulsing around it.

His baby.

His heir.

He burrowed his forehead into the edge of the bed and beat back the ache with his fist.

The Dark smiled.

_Love._

In his mind’s eye, he saw a red room. A man whose Darkness had twisted him into a wraith swept grandly in front of him. His golden robes glimmered in the eerie light.

_“Do you know which emotion the Jedi fear most?”_

From where Ren knelt, he’d answered with conviction.

_“Hate.”_

And earned a slap.

_“No.”_

Soul stinging, he looked up into the face of his master.

_“What the Jedi fear most is love. For it is in the blackness of the mother’s womb that body and soul first come into communion. Long before it is ever tempered by goodness or truth, love makes covenant with the Dark. When man is born, he knows only Darkness, and it is for this reason he screams – he has been ripped from it, torn from that sweet Dark, in which he was conceived and fed by love.”_

His masters long, twisted fingers reached out to stroke the same cheek he’d slapped. _“A man may kill for hate, yes, but he will rip out the stars for love. It was not hatred that made Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader.”_

He withdrew. _“It was love.”_

The realization washed over Ren in waves as he watched his master ascended the steps to his thrown.

His master turned back, a cruel smile curling like smoke across his sunken face. _“There is no more dangerous power in this universe than a Sith Lord who loves.”_

Back inside the room with his wife, he stood.

He pulled the covers up over her sleeping form and tucked them in at her sides. His gloved fingertips brushed the hair back from her forehead.

Her tender face was peaceful with sleep.

He turned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the North Tower, several hundred floors above the room where they’d met, his mother waited for him inside the Observatory. She leaned heavily on her cane past the base of the titanic telescope, a single speck of stardust against the domed diamond-glass that spanned the width of the room and arched over a hundred stories high. Star-studded space curved all around her, she seemed to stand in the palm of his Galaxy’s hand.

Lit only by starlight, she spoke into the vastness that stretched beyond them. “I wondered if you would come, or if you’d send one of your henchmen to fetch me.” Her lips twitched. She tossed him a glance. “That Captain Phasma’s a piece of work.”

He stepped out from the shadows cast by the base of the telescope.

“We’re not done yet.”

“No.” She turned. Her eyes flashed silver in the pure-white light. “We are not.”

He stepped up to her, unafraid.

_Your treacherous heart can no longer hurt me, Mother._

His voice was dangerously low. “I will ask you only once, and you will answer me with the truth. Did you tell her I would send her away?”

She snorted, an elegant, feminine sound. “Quite the opposite, I assure you. I told her that once you found out she was carrying your child, all hope of her ever finding freedom was lost. That if she tried to leave you now, you would go to the ends of the Galaxy to reclaim her, and leave a trail of burned worlds in your wake that would make the devastation of the war look like an overture.”

His nostrils flared.

He raised his chin in triumph. “So then you understand.”

Her eyes narrowed. Her voice was deceptively soft. “Oh, I’ve understood for some time now. What I cannot fathom- what I cannot _stomach_ , is what you’ve done to that girl.”

His aura rose like a malignant phantom around them as he bore down on her. “What _I’ve_ done?”

Her gaze never faltered. “Yes.”

“And what is that, _exactly_? That I’ve given her the Galaxy? Or that I’ve made her a Queen? Or maybe it’s that I’ve loved her, as you’ve only ever pretended to-”

“If you believe that,” she snarled up at him, “then you really are the lunatic they say you are.”

“ _You_ -” he hissed. His hand drifted back to his holster.

Inside its hilt, his crystal pulsed and thrummed.

“Do not _ever_ speak to me that way. I am your Supreme Leader, and you will _show me_ my due deference.”

She sneered. “If you want to play Dark Lord of the Empire, you can stop threatening me and start by treating your wife like an empress, rather than some whore you bought on Canto Bight.”

His chest swelled. He shook with rage. “What did you-”

“You. Heard. Me. Boy.” Her cane rapped the floor by their feet. “Honestly, Benjamin, what in the Galaxy are you thinking? Dressing her up like an Alderaanian concubine and tossing your trunk at her like a bantha in musk, in front of your General, in front of your soldiers. In. Front. Of. Your. Mother.”

_Rap rap rap rap rap-_

“Your grandfather would have fallen on his own saber before he disgraced his wife the way you have yours.” Contempt twisted the regal features of her face. “He’d be disgusted if he could see you now.”

Her words struck him like a physical blow.

He reeled and stumbled backwards, stunned.

She gave him no quarter, advancing and pressing up on her cane until they were so close he could see the milky starlight reflected in her eyes.

“You look out into the Galaxy and see only your power, your _supremeness_ ,” she spat. “But do you know what she sees when she looks at those same stars? Suffering. Struggle. Weeping. She doesn’t see your _victory_ , she sees her failure.”

Summoning his anger like a reserve, he returned fire. “And whose fault is _that_? You were the one who made her your martyr, your _Luke Skywalker_. You sent her to kill me-”

“I sent her to save you. I believed-”

She faltered. Some of her venom retreated as she searched for the words. “I believed that she could… touch a part of you. A part your father wasn’t able to reach. A part… I no longer could.”

There was anger still in her eyes, but it wasn’t for him.

It was for herself.

“I saw how you looked at her on Saleucami, the last time you two crossed sabers. It was obvious, before the battle began, that your power had grown beyond hers by an order of magnitude. You didn’t even have to breech the atmosphere, I felt it the moment you entered the system. And so did she.”

Lost in her memories, she turned and gazed out at the stars. “I ordered her to retreat, but she was determined, she believed in the Light-” She stopped, flinching away from the past.

“The moment you drew your sword, I knew you would kill her.”

His chest constricted. Her words strangled his heart.

She looked at him. “But you didn’t. Even after you tossed her staff away like a child’s toy, and she open lay at your feet, you did not strike her. You took off your mask and you-”

_Kissed her._

The grip on his ribs ratcheted tighter at the memory of Rey’s lovely young face, sunburned and smeared with dust from the blast rays and percussion grenades that exploded all around them like a black symphony. Of her violent tremble, and her eyes so wide and beautiful and afraid, as he reached down into the dirt and lifted her up. Of her sweet, sweet surprise when his gloved fingertips tipped up her chin for her lips to meet his in a soft, chaste kiss.

How he’d longed for her.

Still longed for her.

When his mother spoke again, it was with regret. “After you pulled out your division, I asked her why my son, Supreme Leader of the First Order and her sworn enemy, was making romantic overtures to her in the middle of the battlefield. She had no choice but to tell me everything. About Snoke and your connection through the Force, about your increasingly desperate proposals, and her adamant refusals. I want to say I was surprised, that of all the girls in the Galaxy, you fell in love with a junk scavenger and the only Jedi. But then, I’ve known you all your life.”

Folding her hands over the handle of her cane, she sighed. “So I wasn’t surprised at all.”

He lifted his chin. “Our destiny is written in the stars.”

“Yes, she told me you’d said so, many times.” Again, she sighed. “And she told me that when destiny couldn’t convince her, you offered her the only thing she could possibly want from you, the thing you alone could give her.”

Her words dug at his pride.

“She came to me, didn’t she?” he snarled. “When she got sick of playing your hero, of humoring your pathetic attempts to resist my army. When she grew tired of your failure and your _lies_. She came to me.”

“No, Benjamin.”

His gut lurched.

Suddenly, her eyes were impossibly sad. “I told the last of the Resistance leaders about your offer, without Rey’s knowledge. We took a vote-”

Realization was dawning, a cold, ugly light.

“All were yea’s, except for one-”

He knew which one.

“The pilot.”

“Commander Dameron, yes. He said he’d rather die, and I assured him we all would if we did not convince her that somehow-” Her voice faltered.

She became more composed, more remote, even as she leaned more heavily on her cane, “That somehow this was the best plan of action. Of course, none of us knew then, about the boy-”

His intestines twisted and wrenched.

“FN-2187.”

“Finn.” Her chin lifted in challenge. “A brave war hero.”

“Brave,” he sneered.

“They’d kept their love a secret-”

_Their love._

Her words tore through him like the barbs on a mace.

“She was afraid that in your delusion about being star-crossed soulmates, you would kill her lover out of jealousy.”

_Her lover._

His hands shook.

He balled his fist and struck at the ache in his chest, hard enough the bruise the rib around it.

“Yes,” he rasped. “She’s a very smart girl. Very perceptive.”

“The night before the three of you arrived for negotiations, she came to me privately. She begged me to hide her, promising she could grow stronger if we only gave her more time-”

“ _Enough_.” His fists were in front of him. His body tensed into an animal stance as his breath began to come in fast, shallow pants. “Enough of your _lies_.”

 _Enemy_ , the Darkness hissed.

_Strike her down._

He gritted his teeth. “Get out.”

_No, strike._

“Benjamin-” The false pity in her soft, familiar eyes incensed him.

“ _Get. Out_.”

_Kill her._

Inside his saber, his kyber rattled.

His breath came faster and faster.

She held out her hand. It trembled in the space between them. “Listen to me, Benjamin. There is still time-”

His fists clenched so hard his nails bit through the leather tips of his gloves.

“Get. Out. Now.”

_Kill. Kill. Kill._

“Benjamin, please.” She crept closer. She was shaking as badly as he was. “You cannot let your Darkness destroy her. You have to be stronger-”

Inside him, his organs boiled. He dropped down to one knee and snarled.

_Kill it. Kill it. Kill the Light._

His hand drew back towards his holster.

He looked at her. The tears that dripped from her eyes fell like shooting stars along her cheeks. 

“My darling boy-”

His hand gripped the hilt of his saber. His face twisted in pain.

“Run.”

The kyber ignited with a razor-sharp scream and the blade came to life.

He whimpered, “Please-”

“It’s ok,” she whispered.

Peace drifted over her face.

She closed her eyes. “I still love you. I will always love you, my darling baby boy.”

A sob ripped from his chest as he raised his blade.  

The Darkness clawed and cackled. _Kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it-_

“Kylo.”

Rey stepped into his path.

She wore only her long silk nightgown. Her hair was loose, her feet were bare. Her skin shined in the light of the stars.

His saber sputtered and roared in his hand, its violent red light reflecting in the lens of her wide, soft eyes.

He saw no fear.

Out of the depths of his torment, he moaned her name, “Rey-”

She took his face in her hands.

“Shhh.”

She tipped up his chin. Her fingers stroked through his sweat-soaked hair.

The chanting stopped.

“What are you doing, silly Sith?” she asked. Her voice was warm and soft.

He shook so hard his bones rattled.

“It hurts,” he snarled.

Her thumb brushed across his lips. “So stop.”

He exhaled, and the blades of his shoulders drew down his back.

His Darkness stuttered and sighed.

“You have to be sweet,” she murmured. Her fingers smoothed over his face, making the creases on his brow and around his eyes go slack.

His kyber sputtered and went out.

“Rey-”

She dipped her head. Even on his knees, they were nearly nose-to-nose.

Her mouth was so close he could feel her breath.

“Be sweet, Sith,” she breathed. “I love you when you’re sweet.”

He dropped his saber and wrapped his arms around her waist.

She kissed him.

Even though he’d had her body a hundred times, and tasted her mouth a thousand more, each kiss felt like the very first – dark and arresting, full of violent want.

She drew his lip between hers and stroked his hair.

The Darkness purred.

_Ours._

Slowly, their lips peeled apart with a soft, sensual _smooch_.

Backed by a light of a billion stars, she laid her forehead on top of his and looked into his eyes. The tips of her little fingers tickled his face.

He rasped her name, "Rey."

“I’m here.”

Her hand slipped between them to cradle her belly. 

“We both are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YASSS MOMMA LEIA - read that boy-king for filth! And YASS QUEEN REY! PUT A LEASH ON THAT SITH!
> 
> GOD I love torturing this man. It's just, ooooow it's my favorite.
> 
> Hope this met your expectations. We can't have a Reylo baby without some classic Skywalker drama. ;)


	21. A Sith and a Bird Can Fall In Love... But Where Will They Build Their Nest?

“Has this happened before?”

Her words trickled into his consciousness from a crack above him, creating a cascade of concentric circles on the black surface of his mind.

Where she lay curled up between his legs, her fingertips stroked feather-soft at the blue veins still straining furiously along his forearms.

“Shhh.” His quiet murmur seemed to stretch across space before it reached them. “Not yet.”

She laid her cheek on his naked chest and concentrated on hopping her fingers in the tender spaces between his knuckles as she hummed to herself.

Slowly, he connected to her presence - her profile cradled in his arms, his hands spanned covetously over the soft swell of her belly, the slip of her silk nightdress and her warmth soaking through it – and edged out his rage by degrees.

Finally, when the Darkness had crept back into his center, and his aura no longer crackled with black fissures of power, he opened his eyes.

“Rey.”

“Mm?” Her fingertips hopscotched between his first and third knuckles.

“Don’t ever do that again.”

Her hand paused over his and she wriggled, tipping back to look at him. “ _Me_?”

“Yes you, little Jedi.” He met her wide, pretty eyes.

Something sensual and violent shifted under his skin.

He ignored it, and his heavy erection that dug insistently at the soft curve of her ass. He would not take her with the Dark so close to the surface.

He would  _not._

_Take control of your emotions._

“Next time,” he warned her, “go _away_ from the danger, not towards it.”

She snorted, “Please. The only thing in this Galaxy more obsessed with my safety than you are is your Darkness.”

”My Darkness?”

” _Yes_.” She rolled her eyes. “It follows me everywhere, like a creepy lovesick porglette. _Have I met your comfort, dear one? Which of your desires may I fulfill for you, dear one? Beware, this man is an enemy, dear one._ It’s constant, and annoying. Like C-3 almost, but smart. And evil.” Her brows drew so close together they nearly touched. “Is the Light like that? Relentless and…”

She groped for the right word.

“Romantic?”

He told her the truth, gently. “I can no longer feel it. The pull to the Light.”

“Oh.” She looked down at his hands, cupped tenderly around her belly.

Around their baby.

“What I keep wondering is-” her voice was young and small. She peeled up one of his fingers, lifting it as high as it would go then letting it thump back to her belly before taking its neighbor and repeating the gesture. “Has something like this ever happened before?”

His eyebrow arched. He drawled, “Have I ever killed a parent before?”

He angled his chin and pretended to think. “Hm, let’s see…”

“No-” She huffed something suspiciously like _stupid_ below her breath. “I _mean_  something like us. A Sith and a Jedi. Falling in love.”

She glanced up at him through her lashes. “Has that ever happened before?”

_Falling in love._

His heart tripped.

He nodded. “Once.”

She kept plucking his fingers and letting them plink back onto her belly as she murmured, “What happened?”

“Well-”

He gathered her closer and nested them deeper into the bedding. “There was a Jedi Master-”

“When?” she chirped.

Used to her incessant overtalk, he answered patiently, “Before my grandfather was born.”

“So a long time ago,” she decided.

“Yes. A long time ago, there was a Jedi Master. He lived alone on a very desolate planet, as a recluse-”

She paused with one of his index fingers pinched in her hand. Her nose crinkled cutely. “A what?”

“Re-cluse,” he repeated slowly. “A hermit, someone who lives alone.”

“Oh,” she said. Her face softened with sympathy.

It made his black heart ache.

“But if he lived alone, how did he fall in love?”

“Someone sought him out. A student, gifted with the Force-”

Her eyes lit with interest. “A student. Was she beautiful?”

His lips twitched. “The legends say he was quite handsome, yes.”

He watched that sink in.

“He? _He_ was a boy? But the Jedi Master was a him.” Her nose wrinkled again. “How is that even possible?”

“Why Rey of Jakku,” he smirked, “what a little conservative you are.”

“I’m not trying to be one,” she hedged plaintively. He was sure it was because she didn’t know what a conservative _was_ , rather than that she was sure she wasn’t one. “I just don’t see … how they could fall in love.”

His eyes wandered over her breasts, down to where she played with his hands. He pictured her from the first time they met, swaddled in rags and caked in desert, an outmodelled blaster trembling in one hand and every intention of killing him reflected in her big, beautiful eyes.

“As we all do. Recklessly. Blindly-”

He closed his eyes. A self-deprecating smirk twisted the ruined half of his face. “Insanely.”

His mother’s words came back to him, _I told the last of the Resistance leaders about your offer… we took a vote… She begged me to hide her-_

Rage, black and malignant, cracked through his gut. He felt its long, gossamer fingers fan out over his aura.

The sound of her voice piping curiously pulled him back to her. “Then did the student become a Sith?”

He opened his eyes.

“He did. A very powerful one. So powerful that the Jedi Counsel began to fear him. They met with his master in secret, and asked him to kill the Sith Lord.”

She gasped. “Why?”

“Because he was the only Jedi in the Galaxy whose power rivaled his pupil’s.”

Sadness moved like a shadow across her face. “That’s horrible.”

He thought about the last time he faced her in battle, the sickening lurch in his gut as his blade ignited, breath shaking as he swore to himself, _I will not strike her. I will not. I will not._

He nodded. “Yes, it is.”

She clutched onto his finger. “What happened? Did the Master agree to fight him?”

“He had no choice. He was a Jedi, and they were ruled by their Counsel,” he didn’t try to mask his contempt. “They met on a planet in the Sunshi system to battle. They fought for forty days-”

“Forty days,” she balked. “That’s impossible!”

His lips twitched. “The way you fight, yes-”

She scowled.

“But they were Lord and Master, extremely disciplined-”

“Could you fight for forty days?” she asked.

Without hubris or hesitation, he answered.

“Yes.”

Rather than dubious, she looked validated.

And, he noted, proud.

He lifted a hand from her belly and took one of hers. It was so small it fit inside his palm.

Like her power.

“They fought for forty days, because neither one of them could deliver the blow that would kill the other. Then, at dawn on the forty-first day, the Sith Lord killed himself-”

Her breath caught. “What?”

“He ran himself through with his saber.”

Her mouth trembled. She stared up at him in earnest. “Why would he do that?”

He looked at her hand in his, felt the weight of her womb pressed in the other.

“For love.”

She shook her head. “But the Jedi-”

“There is no more dangerous power in this universe than a Sith Lord who loves. Even to ourselves.” His rueful smile pursed the rent half of his face. “Temperance is not one of our virtues, and neither is defeat. The Sith Lord was determined to win. And he did.”

She concentrated on lacing their fingers together as a tear dropped down her cheek. Her voice warbled. “But he died.”

“So that his lover would live.” His lips brushed her forehead. He looked out into the darkness of their bedroom.

“That was his victory.”

She sagged against him, devastated. “What happened to the Jedi Master?”

“He disappeared. They say he left the Galaxy-”

“That’s impossible. No one can leave the Galaxy.”

She pulled back and looked at him. Her eyes were angry and wet. “And if he could leave, he should have left with the Sith. They should have run away from the Counsel. Then they could have been together.”

Sometimes he forgot just how young she was. How tender.

That his mother had placed the weight of the Galaxy on her shoulders made his hatred surge anew.

“Rey, beloved-” his murmur was deep and gentle. He brought their joined hands near her face so that he could thumb away her tears. “Don’t cry for the Sith. He would not be worthy.”

“Of course he would,” she snapped.

A violent affection bloomed inside his chest.

“It’s horrible,” she persisted, furious. “How could the Master be so heartless? How could the Sith leave him all alone?”

She closed her eyes. “Don’t people ever get tired of being sad?”

He bowed his head, until the tip of his long nose touched her small one. He nudged gently until she opened her eyes.

“I will never leave you, Rey.”

Her face cracked. She clung onto his neck and buried herself in his chest.

He heard her muffled sob, and felt her tears, hot and slick, slip over his skin.

Over his heart.

“Shh. My darling, listen-“ He laid his cheek on her crown and stroked her hair. “We’re going to grow old together. We’ll watch our children-”

He stopped to swallow.

“We will watch our children grow up and marry, and have children of their own. Fat, healthy babies, an obscene number of them-”

She hiccupped and snorted, a warm burst of moist air against his clavicle.

His lips twitched.

“You think it’s funny now?” he told her gravely, “Wait until when we’re old and they climb into bed and jump on us, with sharp elbows and feet. They’ll be too fast to catch, so we’ll suffer-”

He felt her broad, wet smile.

“They’ll leave their fieldmines everywhere, like animal scat - clothes and toys and sharp little trinkets. They’ll stab us in the foot when we step on them, and we’ll trip-”

She giggled, a soft, childish sound that warmed him to the marrow. The tips of her little fingers twined into the ends of his hair.

“And oh, God, the noise. The noise will be indescribable. All these tiny savages-” he lifted their joined hands and waved them in the air like a conductor over an orchestra, “shrieking and squalling, _everywhere_. Without a doubt, we’ll go deaf-”

She raised her head. Even in the low blue light, her eyes were starbright.

He brushed back her hair and cupped her face. “You’ll never have a moment’s peace. Even when you go to the refresher, one of those little curs will be hiding in the bathtub, waiting to strike.”

He laid his forehead against hers. “You’ll never be alone again, Rey of Jakku. I swear to you.”

She kissed him, a soft, chaste press of her lips, and whispered, “Neither will you.”

He closed his eyes. His hand on the small of her back drew her closer, he savored the feeling of her soft breasts and belly pressed against him.

They fell asleep that way - hands holding, cheeks touching, and their baby sheltered between their bodies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, before you come at me in the comments with, "Kylo's too tender and OOC in this", just remember:
> 
> This guy sliced his master in half with a light saber, and his **exact next move** was to pivot to the girl he's known a grand total of twenty minutes and ask, "Will you marry me and be my Galactic princess?"
> 
> "Please?"
> 
> I mean, I'm just saying. Dude's **also** romantic AF.


	22. With Great Power...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a reader once asked me in the comments how old I imagine these characters to be. More specifically, if I follow their ages in the novelizations. Then I was all, "Sure", but what I now realize is that whoever novelized these characters has not the sense God gave a grasshopper. Because really, who the fuck is a General at 28? Or Emporer of the Galaxy at 29? 
> 
> No one ever, says Pastel.
> 
> And honestly, Rey looks 16 in TFA, and Kylo Solo looks **at least** 35 in TLJ. So... that's kinda how I imagine them. And Hux? 41 if he's a day. Phas is definitely 50. I'm sorry, I just can't take them seriously if they're under 30. If you don't like it, you can blow me.
> 
> Whoa, that was really rude, Pastel. 
> 
> I'm very sorry. I take it back.  
> :>

The elevator slowed its approach.

From where she was tucked in at his side, she tipped up her chin. Her voice was soft and beseeching.

“Are you sure you won’t come down?”

He sneered at the seam of the doors. “For what?”

“To say goodbye.” She turned to him fully, laying her hand not cradled in the crook of his arm over his heart. Her eyes were earnest. “This may be the last time you ever see her.”

Something barb-edged and rankling coiled around his chest.

He ignored it, enunciating wryly, “If the Force wills it.”

The carriage hummed to a smooth stop. “ _Floor two hundred, East Hanger, Main Bridge_.”

He stepped through the parting doors.

“ _Please watch your step as you exit_.”

Turning, he offered her his hand.

The gentle entreat in her eyes tightened the noose around his heart.

He lifted his chin.

Aiming her sigh down at the durasteel, she laid her hand in his and let him draw her smoothly from the carriage.

“Your Malevolence.” General Hux greeted him obeisantly. He was flanked by two lines of the elite guard dressed in full Stormtrooper armor.

“Your Majesty.” He gave Rey a deep, formal bow. He offered her his arm. "May I escort you to the landing dock?"

She looked back up at Ren. “Last chance, Sith.”

He stepped into her, so that she had to crane her neck to see him. He raised her hand still in his and looked at her with lightless eyes.

“If I go down there, I will kill them.” He pressed a kiss to her knuckles. His crooked smile twisted the rent half of his face. “And I would enjoy it.”

Her hand slipped slowly from his glove.

“That makes me sad,” she said softly.

He shrugged. "It's what I am."

"But it’s not _all_ that you are.” Her eyes were luminous. Beautiful. “Not to me."

Rather than remember that last time he felt the pull towards the Light, he coaxed her gently towards the General with his hand against the small of her back. “Go on. I’ll be here.”

She hesitated, then stepped up and curled her hand gingerly around the General’s arm.

Hux stood still as stone as she settled into his side.

“General,” Ren waited for those beady blue eyes to meet his before he looked meaningfully at his wife. “Have a care.”

The other man angled his chin in wry assent. “As if she were my own, Your Highness.”

Ren tried not to snort at Rey's alarm. 

The General glanced down at her. Despite the slight heel on her slippers and her hair piled delicately on top of her head, she hardly reached his shoulder.

His tone was coolly deferential. “Is Her Majesty ready?”

“Yes, please." She tilted away, as if his proximity itself was poisonous. "A-and thank you. For walking me. Escorting me, I mean. That’s, um- you’re really, uh- very kind.”

_Force help us..._

His eyebrow arched magnificently. “I can assure Her Majesty that the pleasure is all mine.”

Before she could fumble through a response, he hiked his chin into the air and swelled. “Atten-tion!”

His deafening cadence rebounded off the plexi-plastic walls, making them both flinch.

“Fall in!”

With a heavy _clack_ , Ren’s elite guard fell into two lines behind them.

“For-ward _march_!”

They kicked off into an excruciating half-pace towards the lift.

Ren hid his amusement behind his glove as he watched the General struggle to cinch his elegant stride to match his wife's short little sashay.

_Not as easy as it looks, is it, asshole?_

The long trail of her gown spanned the distance between them and the guard, its bustling rippling the blue silk with each step she took. Under the harsh white lights a hundred feet above them, the tear-shaped crystals draped through her hair twinkled like a constellation of cerulean stars. She looked so vulnerable against the backdrop of durasteel and the titanic black-and-white banners hung around the hanger. So small.

The Great Dark frowned. _Our dear one is unguarded._

“She’s got twenty guards, and Hux,” he muttered, “For whatever he’s worth.”

 _Coward,_ It rebuked him harshly. _You fear your mother._

Her words in the Observatory played back to him unbidden, " _She begged me to hide her, promising she could grow stronger if we only gave her more time-"_

Something virulent shifted below the surface of his skin. He ground his anger between his teeth and spat, “I do not go down because I will strike her.”

The Great Dark smiled. _So then strike._

Up ahead, Rey and the General were finally at the lift. She looked back at him.

Their eyes met. Even from this distance, he could sense the life his love created inside her, knitting itself in her sacred dark.

She smiled.

The love in her eyes split him to the bone.

As the General ushered her onto the lift, he told the Darkness, “She would never forgive me.”

 _Weakling._ His Darkness sneered. _You are not worthy of her._

“ _Yes I am_.”

As the doors closed, he turned to look out on the landing floor below. His mother was waiting with her mongrel and their droids at the foot of their transporter’s loading ramp. Her ancient protocol bot was angled upwards, staring at him.

_C-3._

Its intake sockets expanded and contracted thoughtfully as he stepped closer to the glass. From another world, he heard its mild admonishment. “ _My, Master Solo, what a muddle we’ve made. What will Mother say?_ ”

Where he'd sat on the floor, a lonely little boy of four, he hugged his knees and sulked, “ _If I break my toys, I shall not have new ones.”_

“ _That is correct. Mother was very serious indeed, sir.”_

Hiding from reproach under a tangle of curls, he'd surveyed the broken pieces scattered around him. The pieces had belonged to a large model battleship, traded to him by his father in exchange for Han Solo's time. Time the smuggler preferred to spend drinking and gambling and telling pretty young girls about the day he destroyed the Death Star and saved the Galaxy.

Even now, the memory of Han's heavy hand ruffling his hair with a cavalier grin made his chest burn and his breath stutter with rage.

On the floor, surrounded by bits of battleship he'd been bribed with, he struck out with his feet and with his fists. “ _I don’t care if I have nothing to play with, I hate these toys! I hate them!”_

Just as it did now, the bot had cocked its hip and considered him, its intake sockets dialing as it tried to parse what it could not understand. Heartbreak.

 _"Quite right,”_ it decided. _“These toys are appallingly substandard. Most unbefitting for a young prince. Come, Master Solo,"_ it tilted itself downward, _"We shall play a different game.”_

It offered him one of its bright, brassy hands. " _Together.”_

Wiping his nose with his sleeve, he curled his tiny hand around the cool metal and climbed to his feet. As they walked, he concentrated on pressing up onto the tips of his toes, mimicking the bot's mincing steps as he clutched its hand for balance, and felt his anger slip away by degrees.

 _“_ _C-3?”_ he piped. 

_“Yes, sir?”_

He peeked up through his curls. _“Can I have some cake?”_

"May _I have some cake, Master Solo.”_

 _“But you can’t have any cake,”_ he said gravely, even as his small, moist mouth began to curl at the corners. _“You’re metal.”_

_“Oh my oh dear, I’ve fallen for it again! You are simply too clever, sir…”_

The memory faded.

Back on the bridge, he looked down at the bot. It was angling its head this way and that, as if recording him in its archives forever.

The thought that this was how it would remember him pricked at Ren's heart.

His dark gaze shifted away, to where the women were enfolded in a deep embrace. Even to his damned eyes, the Light that passed between them was beautiful.

This time, when they parted, it was Rey who touched the tears from his mother’s cheek.

 _Such tenderness for the one who’s condemned her to us_ , mocked the Dark.

He snorted, a bitter, hate-filled sound.

His mother turned and took the ramp, relying heavily on her cane.

He moved closer to the plexi-plastic.

This was the last time he would ever see her, before the life left her body and she was laid down to rest on which distant planet he would never know. He sensed it in his soul. And so did she. 

Yet, she did not look back at him. Even though he _knew_ she felt him. Even when she reached the top of the ramp and paused for the breadth between heartbeats. Even as he held his breath and _willed it._ She did not look back.

His final image was of her dissolving into the transporter’s black, gaping mouth.

 _"Benjamin-boy,"_ her voice called out to him in sing-song.

He turned away from the hanger.

Her picture, dark-haired and beautiful, flickered in his mind. " _Where-oh-where is my Benjamin-boy? Oh-where-oh-where can he be?"_

_"Here I am, Momma!"_

_"Ah, there’s my darling boy…"_

He blinked, and realized his lashes were wet.

Shame cracked across him like lightening, grounding in his gut and spiking outwards through his aura as a black web of animus.

His chest tightened. He couldn’t breathe.

“Darkness-”

_I am here, Son._

It rushed over him like a black flood, submerging him in rage until his grief guttered and choked.

Pain lanced through his left arm. He struck at it with his fist.

 _Kill her now,_ the Dark whispered, _and you will never look over your shoulder for her again._

He fought for breath. “No-”

_She will come back to hurt you. She loves to hurt you._

It played her words to him, giving them shape and weight, painting violent scenes across the back of his sight. " _Of course, none of us knew then, about the boy… Finn, a brave war hero. They’d kept their love a secret-"_

He saw the traitor, sweat-slicked and panting as he moved over his wife. Rey's voice, desperate and clear, " _I will never stop loving you._ _He can’t make me-"_

His lips peeled back over his teeth as his horizon tried to tilt up and over him. “Stop-”

 _"Do you know what she sees when she looks at those same stars? Suffering. Struggle. Weeping. She doesn’t see your_ _victory_ _, she sees her failure_."

Rey on her knees on the floor of the _Falcon_ , sobbing, " _Those were innocent people! Women… a-and children, and you… God."_

He shook his head until he was sick and spinning, but the images wouldn’t shake out of his mind. “I didn’t- she knew what I was when she came to me- when she came- came to me-”

 _"No, Benjamin."_ The heels of his hands dug against his eyes as he tried to crush the starlight he saw in his mother's cold stare. _"_ _I told the last of the Resistance leaders about your offer. We took a vote-"_

“Enough!” He beat his fist into his breast. “Take control of your emotions!”

The Dark’s smile was feral and mocking, _She will come back to take your Light_.

“Take control-”

 _She’ll take your beloved, and kill your heir. Drown it in a river like a runtling. And she will laugh, because she hates you. She has_ always _hated you._

It showed him a vison, of his mother kneeling by the water, a baby squalling in her arms. He felt the cold plunge, heard her cruel cackling.

 _She knew you were a monster from the beginning. That’s why she sent you away. She knew her brother would try to kill you. She_ wanted _him to kill you._

“I said enough!”

High above him, the lights of the hanger swelled and grew brighter, burning his retinas and heightening the contrast until all he could perceive were the edges between shadow and light. He scratched at the ache in his eyes and snarled.

 _Do you see now, the price you pay for cowardice, for_ humanity _? Do you see what your weakness has wrought?_

Staggering blindly, he did the last thing he could think of. He reached out through the Force.

_Rey-_

_I’m coming._ He heard her voice through their bond, breathless and panicked. _I felt you. I’m coming. Hold on-_

The horizon crested over him like a tidal wave and he hit the deck. Hard. 

From seemingly another galaxy, he heard the lift doors at the other end of the bridge open.

She screamed his name.

He squinted through his heartbeat and the blinding white to see her. "Rey..."

She was running up the deck, barefoot, the front of her gown balled in her fists. The General ran right behind her.

Shouting. Everyone was shouting.

His hands trembled. He wedged them under his chest and strained upward with every one of his cells. His veins popped, he bared his teeth as he growled, “Get.. up...”

But the Darkness bore back at him.

“Kylo!” Light collided with Dark, knocking the pressure back by an inch as she fell on her knees at his side and threw herself on top of him. He heard her shrieking as if through water. “Kylo, what’s happening? Talk to me, say something!”

Her hands scrambled around him, she strained until he was on his back, staring up into the light. “Oh God oh God oh God-“ 

She screamed, “Somebody help my husband!”

“The light-” he tried to drag his arm over his eyes, but he couldn’t lift his fingers. “It hurts.”

Remembering his vision, he rasped, “My baby-”

“Here,” she pressed his hand to her belly. She shook violently as she tried to soothe, “We’re here, we're right here. It’s ok, please be ok. Kylo, _please_ -”

Her terror sent shockwaves through his aura, increasing his Darkness a hundred fold.

He stopped breathing.

"Please move aside, Your Majesty," the General's voice came calm and measured from his left-hand side.

“General, please,” his wife keened, “He can’t breathe!”

“Yes, I can see that,” he heard Hux's wry drawl, and felt his slim fingers working deftly at his collar where Rey’s little hands had been fumbling.

She demanded desperately, “What’s happening?”

“I have as much information as you do, Your Highness. Now if you please-”

She moved over him, blocking out some of the bright that bled through his eyelids. Her fingertips juddered down his face and along his neck, touching him everywhere she could. Dimly, he sensed his uniform jacket being torn open.

“Kylo,” her voice cracked. She was so hysterical she could hardly speak. “Kylo, _please_ don't do this-”

He tried to tell her, _Shush, my darling_ , but a coldness was creeping over him, curling up through his feet towards his chest like a mist crawling up the valley.

Everything began to wind down.

“-a medical droid, immediately. He’s going into shock,” Hux's voice was like the outline of an echo. "Your Majesty, I'm going to begin the compressions. I need you to move back."

She sobbed, "He's dying-"

"Not today, girl. Now take heart, and tilt his head back. Yes, just like that-"

The last thing he felt was her tears dipping down onto his face as she whimpered, "Please don’t go." 

Then the Darkness swallowed him whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dude, that Darkness don't play. You make a deal with the Devil, expect to pay him twice.
> 
> Oh gosh, wait, did you think the next ten chapters were going to be babies and Force fairytales and fixing up old houses in the rain?
> 
> Uh, no. That's not how this Renporer rolls.
> 
> Also, I am kinda swooning over Hux right now...


	23. The World Was On Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set one year ago, after the battle of Crait.

He stood in a clearing deep in the heart of a remote forest. Behind him was winter, but the blaze that consumed the last Jedi temple burned his front fiery hot, burnishing his face with its red, raging light.

Over the groans of the stone and the snap-crack of fire, a voice croaked out from the tree line.

“Find this one, I thought you would not.”

He watched the flames climb higher into the night, savoring the way their searing light stretched his eyes.

A baleful smirk twisted his scar. “I wondered when you would come.”

“Hrm, confident, were you, great Sith?”

Snow crunched as the imp labored into the clearing. It stopped at his side and folded its crumpled hands over its cane.

Its ears twitched. “Very cold, this place is.”

He looked out at the woods around them. Like his face, the trees glowed hellishly in the firelight, their long, menacing shadows leaping backward like bolts of lightning, striking through the blue-grey dark of the forest beyond. “It is.”

The imp tilted back and stared up at the starless night. Snow began to drift in thick wedges from the sky. “Fear me, you do not.”

It was true, and it wasn’t. Had the imp been alive, he might have been afraid. It was the strongest Sith-killer to ever live, and certainly, it would try to kill him. That’s all the Jedi were, really. Without thirst for power, without appetites, without _attachments_. Simple, self-righteous Sith-killers.

_Even she._

Flinching back from the image of her bared teeth and burning eyes as she strained out for his grandfather’s saber, he tipped up his chin and gazed into the perfect dark. “I fear nothing now.”

It snickered, a ghoulish little close-lipped chortle. “To whom do you lie, Lord Ren? When both of us can see inside your heart.”

Something cool and heavy slipped through his gut. He looked back at the fire, lapping at the night with forked tongues. For a long time, they did not speak. When he finally did, his murmur was distant. Shame-filled. Soft.

“I can't see it anymore. The future.” He studied the edges of the flames, lashing and shifting like waves in the ocean. Never solid. Never real. “I cannot see what is to come.”

It closed its eyes in parody and nodded. “Blinded you, the Darkness has.”

He ground his doubt between his teeth, but the taste was still there. Acrid, virulent. Bitter. “Yes.”

“A great price, you have paid. To seal yourself off from the Light.”

He remembered the wrenching, ripping agony of hours and days spent screaming and snarling on his hands and knees, nails scratching, teeth gnashing, drooling blood and bile and bits of his tongue as he bid the Darkness to saw out his soul.

“Yes.”

The imp’s eyes opened. Its lips curled at the fire. “Yet calls to you, It still does.”

An scene came unbidden, not of her now, but much smaller, crouched inside the cracked hull she’d made her hovel. The meat stretched over her little thighs was painfully lean, one bony arm crossed over her knees, under her chin, while the other poked pebbles into a straight line as she murmured, _“Papa-rock, Mama-rock,”_ and to the littlest one she tucked between them, _“Rey-baby.”_

Ache unfurled inside the bloody, mangled mass of his heart.

_I love her._

He struck at it with his fist and roared. “ _I do not!_ ”

His Darkness mocked him with that weakling’s name inside her small, soft mouth. _Ben-_

And her eyes, those silver-bright eyes, shining up at him with so much trust, so much belief. _You’ll turn. I’ll help you_.

Devastated eyes. Wet, hurting eyes. _Please don’t go this way_ -

Oh, how he'd wanted to hurt her. Achingly. Tenderly. Over and over, in every way he knew, until she bloomed beneath his violent light. His beautiful little lost girl. His beloved.

_Join me._

He growled and snorted and shrieked, slapping his face and scratching his eyes and tearing his collar with his gloves. His fingers dug at his throat and clawed his naked chest. He would tear out his treacherous heart and hurl it into the fire. He’d beat her, strangle her, choke her with his cock, shake her, break her, kiss her, keep her, hold her, feed her, fill her, stroke her belly and whisper always into her hair, _I love you I love you I love you I love you-_

“Never!” He drew his saber and ignited it, slicing out at the ghosts that cackled around him. “I will destroy her!”

The imp watched his feral whirl with kind, knowing eyes. “That, great Sith, is most certain.”

With a savage scream, he swung.

His bade chewed the ice, churning freezing water into the empty air as it bore a scar through the snow.

His teeth clenched, he shook with fury. His Darkness tossed back its head and howled.

“Coward!” He raged through the rawness in his throat. In his soul. “Come out and face me! You fucking cowards! Face me! _Face me_!”

His answer came roaring when finally, the last Jedi temple in his Galaxy succumbed to his fire, its central pier cracking across the waist and bowing gracefully to his feet. The walls folded inward, and in its final throes, it moaned and screamed like a living thing.

The snow fell faster and faster, hissing through the heat radiating from the ruins. It drench him in wet and clung to his lashes, dripping down his cheeks each time he blinked.

It tasted like tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's short, I know, but fear not - I've got more on my Drive that I just need to edit. 
> 
> To that effect, tell me, dearhearts, which do you prefer - frequent updates of shorter chapters, or longer lag times with longer chapters. As Lilia_ula's Kylo likes to say, "Tell me your desire, and I will grant it." :)
> 
> Love y'all. <3, Pastel


	24. I Never Dreamed That I'd Love Somebody Like You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said I'd never write from Rey's perspective. But when the Lord of Darkness himself offers an audience with your imagination... Well.
> 
> Who is Pastel to say no.

*** Three Months Ago ***

 

He folded his hands mildly in front of him, a ludicrous gesture on such a huge, violent man that instantly reminded her of his mother. “Where are we?”

She crossed her arms over her breasts. "I'm going to say a ship. In space."

He sighed sharply through his nose, as if _she_ was the insufferable one, and warned, “Rey.”

“Fine." She looked around at the walls of the narrow corridor, then up at the ceiling, as if the answer would be written somewhere she could see. As if she could read it if it were. "We're in the... East Tower. Floor one thousand, four hundred and... thirty-five?”

"Good." He nodded.

Closing her eyes, she pictured their walk from the elevator, leaving out the bit with her hand in the crook of his arm. “Two- no three corridors right, one left.”

“Very good.” His murmur was closer, deeper inside his chest.

She opened her eyes.

He was practically standing on top of her. His glove creaked in the sliver of open space between them. “Give me your hand.”

She slapped him away. “Why do you need it?”

His jaw ticked, in that way that meant he was grinding something caustic and feral between his teeth. A caution with his words, she'd noticed, he only took with her. 

He lunged suddenly, almost lazily, and caught her wrist. Even through his glove, his touch was freezing as he drew her gently to a command panel beside the single door in the corridor.

Her backpedal pinched sharply at the soreness between her thighs. His appetite for her was insatiable, and she ached deeply from being taken roughly and often.

Before she could stop herself, she mewed and winced.

"Rey?" His voice, like his hand on her wrist, was deceptively soft. He was watching her with dark eyes. "What's wrong?"

Her stomach rolled.

"Nothing. Just... hurry up," she huffed. "I have a briefing on terraforming through hydroponics in an hour, and I don't want to miss it. It's _fascinating_ ," she lied at his bicep, rather than to his face.

"Ah, I see." He entered his identification sequence on the panel’s touchscreen. "Spell hydroponic."

Fury scrunched up her face. She spat, "Fuck you arrogant-"

_“Please state your name.”_

“Kylo Ren,” he spoke smugly into the speech grate.

 _“For identification purposes, please place your hand on the screen.”_  

With her wrist still in one hand, he caught a finger of the other between his teeth and tugged off his glove. The sight of his long, thick fingers and skin as white as sand-maggots made her stomach twist tighter.

She swallowed and stared at the floor.

_“Welcome, Kylo Ren.”_

“Omega?" he spoke into the grate, "Add personnel.”

_“Kylo Ren would like to- Add Personal. For security purposes, please enter your alternate identification code.”_

He tapped in another long series.

 _“Access granted,"_ said the system. _"Please state the name of additional personal.”_

Rather than drag her again, he changed her wrist to his ungloved hand and slipped the other around her waist. Using his big body at her back, he crowded her closer to the wall.

The touch of his bare skin to hers was like ice, the malevolent mist of Dark energy that clung to him was colder than anything she’d ever known. She shook, and she hated herself for it.

His mouth next to her ear made her stomach dip. “Say your name, beloved.”

"Beloved," she parroted softly. Then she blinked. And flushed. Furiously.

 _"I'm sorry,_ beloved _is not a valid input. Please state the name of additional personal."_

His dark chuckle rumbled all around her. She huffed, humiliated, and spat, “Rey of Jakku.”

“ _Rey of Jakku,"_ it acknowledged. _"Please enter your primary identification code.”_

He started to lift her hand in his, when she wrenched herself out of his grip.

“I can do it,” she snapped over her shoulder, without looking back at him. She didn’t want to see his slanted smirk, or his marked, crooked face so close to hers. “I’m not a child.”

His cold breath in her ear warmed her in places she couldn't bring herself to name. “No, you're not.”

Too late, she realized it was a mistake to take her hand back. He wrapped his impossibly long arms around her, cradling her into the curve of his body as he ducked to rest his chin on her shoulder. He swayed them ever-so-slightly, as if instead of adding her to a security protocol, they were two lovers gazing out at the stars.

With another lurch, she remembered they were lovers.

She willed her finger not to tremble as she tapped in her own long identification series. The screen blanked as it processed her credentials, and she could see their reflection in its black mirror. His eyes sought hers intensely.

Quickly, she glanced away.

“ _For identification purposes, please place your hand on the screen.”_

Some of the tightness in her belly eased back when she covered their expressions with her much smaller hand.

He dropped a soft, absent kiss at the join of her neck and shoulder.

She pretended to retch. “ _Ugh_.”

The burst of cold air from his snort tickled down her spine. “Why Rey of Jakku, what a little comedian you are.”

She snapped, “Seriously, Sith- go fuck yourself."

“ _I’m sorry,_ seriously Sith go fuck yourself _is not a valid input. Please enter your alternate identification code into the screen.”_

His hands slid slowly up her waist. She could hear the dark promise in his voice as he murmured, “That's a lot of fucks from you today, Rey. Are you asking for something?”

She scoffed, a harsh, hateful sound, and turned in his arms, beyond caring if her breasts crushed up against his chest, or that she had to fold over backwards just to look up past his huge beak into his soulless eyes. “You’re so disgustingly predictable, do you know that?”

A infuriating smirk warped the ruined half of his face.

“If you weren’t such a spoiled little boy-child, I’d smack the look off you, you- you- big ugly _beast_.”

 _“I’m sorry_ , you big ugly beast _is not a valid input-”_

“Ugly?” His lips twitched. He angled his chin, giving her his malformed profile. “I’ve been told I have a sensitive face.”

Her head dropped back completely, making her ridiculous adornments ring cheerfully. She covered her eyes with her hands. “Force just kill me.”

“-just kill me _is not a valid entry. Please enter your alternate identification code-”_

She ignored the flip-flap in her belly as he tenderly took both her wrists in a single hand.

How could something so cold burn so badly?

“Rey-baby…”

“Don’t.” She kept her eyes closed, _willing_ him dead.

He bumped the tip of her nose with his beak. She could feel his freezing breath on her face. “I’m teasing you.”

“Don’t,” she repeated, wanting to sound menacing and sounding sad instead. “You’re not my friend.”

His fingers threaded carefully through her hairstyle, tickling her jewels as he cradled her in his hand. Her stomach dipped again as his mouth slotted over hers.

“No, I’m not,” he murmured, and kissed her.

Her lips parted. As he pressed his cold tongue deep inside her, her Light sighed into his mouth.

She wanted to scream.

 _Hush, little baby,_ his Darkness crooned, _don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna buy you a mocking bird-_

Over the soft sounds of their kiss, the system chirped, _“An attendant has been notified to assist you.”_

For seemingly an eternity, their lips peeled apart.

“Omega-” He reached around her. His breath shook as he punched in a short sequence. “Protocol override. Read Rey of Jakku’s alternate identification code: beta-echo-naboo-six-three-two-nine-”

As he rattled off her serial, she wrung her hands in his uniform coat, trying to sense solid ground.

_When did I take his jacket?_

_"Welcome, Rey of Jakku.”_

The pneumatic doors hissed open.

With a gentleness that never stopped confusing and incensing her, he uncurled her fingers from his coat. He stepped away, but his aura lingered, bold black bands of power sweeping over its red arc as it courted her Light.

He waited for her in the doorway. His hand twitched by his thigh, but he didn’t offer it again.

"Come inside," he said softly. Something in his eyes made her hesitate.

“Rey.”

“What's in there?” She stood up on her toes, trying to peer past his black bulk. She thought she glimpsed the stars.

His jaw ticked once, grinding down something harsh into, "My darling-"

He stretched out his words. "I won’t tell you a third time.”

“ _Fine._ ” She squeezed by him with as haughty as sneer as she could gather, making sure her shoulder bumped him sharply as she stalked into a room one-third of the size of her closet. “Honestly, it’s like you think you’re Supreme Leader of the Galaxy or something. Have you ever thought to say please once in your life-”

_Oh. Shit._

The realization crashed into her with all the grace of an asteroid. She closed her eyes. _Shit shit shit shit shit-_

He gave her his back, turning instead to a small terminal beside the single escape pod occupying sixty percent of the room. Through the domed diamond-glass hatch, infinite space sprawled beyond them.

This was a launch bay.

He was sending her away.

Another meteor, the size of a planet this time, slammed her heart out of orbit. “Well, that didn’t take long.”

She hated, _hated_ how breathless she sounded. How _wounded_.

“Not that I blame you. Seems to be the done thing, really. With me." She forced a self-deprecating smile and tried to wring some of the ache in her chest through her hands. "Three weeks is a bit of a record, though. Guess you’re more _discerning_ ,” she surprised herself with one of the General’s words. The needling prick at her eyes surprised her, too. "Or I was just a lousy fuck."

He angled his chin, so that over his shoulder, she could see just his cheekbone, the curve of one eye, his dark lashes and that ludicrous nose. “Rey.”

But her shame and her words came faster and faster as her fingers knitted tight. “Can you imagine the look on Tito’s face when I turn back up on Jakku in a Queen’s costume?"

She did, closing her eyes against the now violent glare of the blue-hued lights. "He’ll laugh himself sick. The jewels won't be worth much, but the dress'll fetch a good price in hock, probably. Silk’s an excellent conductor, rare too, and God knows I’ll need the credits-”

Her throat sealed shut, and she was there, in her sweltering hovel, choking on loneliness and dust. This time, she had no reason to think she’d be leaving. Her heart would stop beating, and time would slip like sand through her fingers. Just like everything else had, because she was a worthless stupid throw-away failure-

“ _Rey_.”

He cupped her face. His hands were as cold as ice.

"What-" her breath hitched, and she _hated_ him. "The Last Jedi can't suck cock like you like? You fucking monster-"

He kissed her, his most gentle yet. And still, it was consuming. Dominating. Desperate.

Could she blame herself for believing him, when he touched her like this?

Their lips parted, she looked up into his dark, dangerous eyes. The look in them was strangling, any sane soul would have called it hatred.

But he wasn’t sane.

Or maybe she was the crazy one.

The room spun viciously. She closed her eyes and spun with it. “Where am I going?”

Her voice sounded pathetically small.

He gathered her up in his arms as his Darkness folded around them. She pressed her cheek to his chest, feeling the cool that seeped out through his coat, and listened the savage thrashing of his heart.

“Nowhere,” he said, dark and deep. His embrace was brutal. She clenched her eyes and willed him to hold her harder.

And he did. He absolutely did.

“It’s just a precaution," he told her. He was practically pleading. "In case something happens, I need to know you can get off this ship.”

“What’s going to happen?” she whispered, even as her mind supplied a hundred thousand different scenarios. All of them equally unbearable.

“Not a Goddamn thing,” he swore, too violently. The tight tremor in his voice made a liar out of him. “But if it does, if I go down- Rey. You have to get off this ship.”

His words fell straight through her into the open trap door under her feet.

Suddenly, the sound of his heart, his human, fallible heart, made her sick to her stomach.

“This is insane,” she whispered, to no one at all.  

“Don’t go to the apartment, that’s the first place they’ll look," he measured his words, slow and clear, as the tips of his fingers started to tremble into her skin. "I’ve set the terminal in this bay to launch the apartment pod uncloaked ten seconds after this one passes through the detection field. There’s an explosive wired into the dummy bay’s terminal- when they ask for your ship’s landing coordinates, it’ll detonate. That should buy you some time.”

She shook her head, her face rubbed in his coat.

Cold. Everything was too cold.

“Why are you saying this?" her voice was hardly a whisper. But still full of rage. "To hurt me? To make me afraid? Is it funny to you, when you frighten me? When I can’t breathe-”

Her words choked off, because she really wasn’t breathing. She was crying too violently to catch her breath.

“No.” He took her arms and tilted her back to see her.

To glory in her humiliation. To revel in her shame.

Poe Dameron was right. He was a sadist.

A monster.

“Look. at. me. Rey.”

She did. His lightless eyes were the most dangerous thing she’d ever seen.

“I am telling you this-” his throat bobbed. He swallowed. “Because if I go down, they’re going to come for you. All of them. You need to take my saber, and get off this ship. You can’t hesitate, even for a second-”

“Please,” she spat, as a loathsome fear twisted and tore her heart. “You really think I’d stop to grieve you, like some pathetic heartbroken widow? You’re delusional. Disgusting."

She bared her teeth, at him and at the emotion rising up unwanted, unasked for. "I wouldn’t stop to spit on your body.”

“Good,” he growled. He dug into her arms, bringing down his face until they were almost nose-to-nose. His sneer cracked around its edges, eyes glinting in the blueish light. “Good girl. That’s it. You take my saber, and you run your little ass down here and get the hell out of my Galaxy.”

“I’m counting the seconds,” she snarled breathlessly, through the tremor in her mouth. "And that's if I don't kill you first!"

"You haven't yet, and not for lack of trying."

"Asshole," she shrieked, "I hate you!"

He kissed her savagely.

She sobbed inside his mouth.

He took her there on the terminal, not stopping to gloat when her cunt was shamefully, tellingly, treacherously slick beneath her dress. He hammered her mercilessly, bringing her off with one hand, the other wrapped lovingly around her throat, as the heels of her feet scrambled at his naked ass for purchase. He was unlike anything she’d ever known before, his brute size, his sheer physical strength. His Darkness. Cold as it moved in and through her, coiling around her aura like a great dragon with jealous eyes and a violent heart.

Her Light unfurled in ecstasy, bathing in his power, swallowing it down in dribbling mouthfuls and sloshing it white inside her belly.

She cried his name as she came, over and over and over.

“Say it,” he snarled as he crashed over her like a tidal wave, taking her in his arms with that wanting, hurting look. _Please._

_"Say it."_

“I love you,” she panted into his mouth, closing her eyes, letting his climax wash her pure again as he poured himself into her cup. Not his Force, not his Darkness. _Him._ Hot, pulsing wet.

Real.

Her legs shook like a newborn doe's after. She stayed crumpled on the terminal, her face tucked inside the crook of her arm, not knowing what she couldn't bare to see more - him, or the pod, and the endless stretch of loneliness beyond.

He tucked his softening cock back in his trousers and pulled her dress down over her sex like she was a child. Then he carried her out of the bay, down the corridor, all the way to their apartment.

 

 

 

 *** Now ***

 

“ _Please state your name.”_

She braced her hand on the wall by the panel. Her chest cinched from sobbing and shrieking and running. Running for her life. For their baby’s.

She swallowed her heartbeat and gulped for breath. “R-Rey of Jakku.”

_“For identification purposes, place your hand on the screen.”_

The image of him convulsing on the floor of the bridge, after the medical droid shocked his heart awake, reached up and strangled her. Her scream shattered like glass in the empty corridor.

_“I'm sorry, I did not understand your answer. For identification purposes, place your hand on the screen.”_

Her hand shook. The other wrung the hilt of his saber.

She imagined what Hux and Phasma, Colonel Holstead and all the others, would do to her when they found her. What they would do to him, now that he was all alone.

Her husband. Her lover.

Pictures fell past her eyes like leaves falling in a whisper of wind. His face in profile. The breadth of his shoulders. His affectionate sneer. The way he took her hand when she crossed a threshold. His wide, lurching gait. The way his chest rumbled when he read her to sleep. His cold kisses. His laugh. How he looked when he told her, _You’re everything, beloved. Everything._

“Where are the others?” she’d asked him once, seated in his lap inside the tub. He was still inside her, hot and slick from their come.

He rested his chin on her shoulder, his body warm where the water touched him, cold where it did not. “Other what?”

She laced their fingers together. How could a person be so _big_? “The other Siths. Your Kylo Kings, or whatever.”

“The Knights of Ren?" he drawled. Then he said quietly, "They’re gone.”

"Gone?" She’d wriggled until she was looking up at him over her shoulder. “How can that be?”

He looked into her with those dark, damned eyes, and she knew. “You killed them.”

“I had to.” He studied their hands together, lifting them out of the water so he could kiss the tips of her fingers tucked between his knuckles. “Believe me.”

It was a strange, unsettling emotion, to realize she did.

“So we’re the last,” she said softly, looking past her breasts at their blurred reflection in the bath.

He gathered her closer, covetous of her even when they were alone.

“We’re the beginning,” he murmured into her hair. She felt him pulse inside her. Tethering her. Anchoring her. To him.

She thought about the life inside her, thrumming with gentle light.

His baby.

“I love you,” she whispered, fearful of what was to come. Of what she could see with the Light. Of what he could not.

“I love you, Rey of Jakku.” He leaned them back against the tub. She pressed her ear to his wet chest, submerged in warmth and the sound of his beating heart. His infallible, indomitable heart.“You have no idea, how much I love you.”

She closed her eyes. _He's strong enough. He'll live forever._

Back in the empty corridor, the panel chimed.

_“For identification purposes, please place your hand on the screen.”_

She turned.

Faster and faster, her bare feet slapped against the tile, until she was running again, twice as breathless, back to the elevator. She jabbed the button for their private apartments and wrung both her hands around his saber.

“Come on. Come on come on come on-”

_"North Tower, Private Apartments. Please state your name.”_

She drew her shoulders back. Her entire body shook. This is absolutely the worst idea she'd ever had. “Rey of Jakku.”

_“Welcome home, Rey of Jakku.”_

She pounded through the corridor, holding her skirt along with his saber in her hands, past the entrance to their private rooms, to a part of their home she never ventured to. The only room on his ship he'd forbid her from. The lights grew dimmer as she went, the tile colder under her feet. When she got to the end of the hall, she had to squint in the low light, but she could see her breath.

She expected elaborate, layered security, a panel with multiple locks and codes. Instead, there wasn’t even a door. Just an open doorway, pitch-black, from which coldness rolled out in waves.

His meditation room.

 _"Nothing Light should ever go in there,"_ he told her on the second day of her captivity. _"Tell me you won't go in there."_

She'd promised.

“I can do this.” Her tongue darted out to lick her lips. She ignited his saber, jolting a little as the blade screamed to life. “I can do this, I can do this, I can do this-”

Raising his sword, she stepped tentatively inside the room.

Instantly, the blackness enveloped her.

She looked back over her shoulder, and saw nothing. Nothing beyond the shallow cast of laser light from the saber. She shivered violently in the unbelievable cold.

“Darkness,” her teeth chattered. She pinned her elbows to her sides and forced the sword not to shake. She could barely swallow around her fear. “I’ve c-come with a desire. Darkness, _please_ -”

Before he ever materialized, she heard him. That familiar, hollow click of the oxygen pump through plexi-plastic and durasteel, the rhythmic, vaporous hiss of his breath.

“Lord Vader,” she whispered.

He stepped into the circle of red light.

Though she’d seen him a dozen times as Darkness came courting, each time her terror was new. Acute, burning inside her chest and in her stomach. He was a thousand feet tall, seemingly, taller even than her husband. What light there was pooled on his dome of his mask and reflected back at her like a third eye above his visor. His long cape settled softly around him.

He spoke, the voice of the Great Dark. “I am here, dear one. Speak your desire.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Strange, what desire will make foolish people do. 
> 
> I guess the band's getting back together to help these two crazy kids fulfill their destinies.
> 
> If your an OG Vader groupie, holler in the comments ;)


	25. But If You Tame Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ** Set almost one month ago **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, it's another flashback. And yes, I am stalling. Also, several of you have asked me, in various funny and kind and curious ways, "Does Rey really love that stupid psycho?"
> 
> If you have, if you've wondered, then this is for you :)
> 
> Oh, and the song is Solitude, by Sakamoto Ryuichi, for Tony Takitani. A film about a man who loses his wife.  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIrWY48Kih4

She pressed herself against the black mesh and closed her eyes. She could feel the strange vibrations in her belly and in her chest, striking at her cells, rearranging her into something else, melancholy and beautiful.

“What is this?” she whispered, afraid it would hide from her if she startled it.

He leaned on the back of their sectional and crossed his long legs at the ankles. His black hands folded in his lap.

“Music,” he said softly.

“Muse-ick.” She shut her eyes again, losing herself to the wonderment of the air speaking to her without words. “Music.”

“Do you like it?”

She closed her eyes harder, concentrating on the soul seeping through the speaker panel. “It hurts.”

Her hand rubbed at the ache in her breast. “Here.”

“Yes.” She felt him drift up behind her, his coldness falling over her like a shadow. “Yes it does.”

She pressed closer. But not to the speaker panel. “I hear her crying. She’s so sad. But why is she sad?”

His arms enfolded her, thorough and slow. “Who, beloved?”

“Music,” she said.

He laughed into her hair. “That’s what it’s called, not its name. There are many kinds of music. This piece was written a long time ago, at the beginning of the Empire. For a Sith Lord.”

She turned in his arms, and opened her eyes. “Written?”

Her brows tried to touch in the middle. “But how is it read?”

He laughed again, and kissed her.

Many heartbeats later, when he released her mouth, she could make out his dead capillaries in the low blue light of their apartment, creeping outwards at the corners of his eyes and where his hairline touched his temples. Black roots of a rotted tree.

Already, the Darkness had begun to change his face.

Surrounded by his coldness, she laid her hand over his heart. “Will you tell me, about the Sith Lord and his music?”

He leaned back again, taking her weight easily as she settled in between his powerful thighs. “The Sith coveted the Galaxy-”

She snorted. “Which one doesn't?”

His lips twitched. “He took everything beautiful within it, to give to his wife.”

Her nose wrinkled dubiously. “The Sith had a wife?”

He arched his eyebrow.

“Well, you- you’re different." She plucked bits of invisible lint off his uniform coat. "Grossly romantic. Like... someone who has sex with dead bodies because he thinks they’re lonely or something. But like, more pathetic than that.”

“Why Rey of Jakku.” He grinned, all teeth and fond malice. “What a little flatterer you are.”

She smirked.

Her ring on his chest caught her eye even in the dim light. Its beautiful stone against her ugly fingers stung. “Was his wife a scavenger? Or a kitchen slave?” _Or a worthless fuck-up Jedi?_

“She was a politician.”

“What?” Curious, she glanced up from her lack. “You mean like your mother?”

He paused, but conceded. “Yes. Like my mother.”

She closed her eyes, trying to picture it. A Sith and a politician. “Was she beautiful?”

“Extremely.”

“Then he must have been very powerful.”

His tone took on a vicious pride. “He was.”

“So what happened?” She imagined the scene, a beautiful girl and a great black menace, listening to the heart-piercing melody he ripped from the stars.

Had he held her, as her Sith did now? And afterwards, would she lie in their bed beneath his coldness and kiss him as he made love to her?

Had she loved him?

“He searched the Galaxy for its greatest composer,” his voice was deeper than the darkest ocean. “A man named Sakamoto, to commission for the piece. Sakamoto was also a talented musician- a man who can read music with his hands. When he finished his composition, he played it for the Sith. That was when this recording was taken.”

She listened with all her heart, hearing the story in the sounds. “But… the Sith’s wife was already gone.”

 “Yes.”

“And he believed he killed her. That she died…” she searched the notes, “because she loved him.”

Her eyes opened. “This was your grandfather. This was Darth Vader.”

For the first time in their marriage, she saw him stoop beneath the weight of his inheritance. “After Sakamoto finished playing, the Sith killed him. He ordered the composition to be destroyed, and buried the only recording deep in the Empire’s archives. I found it in the ashes of a Star Destroyer.”

She pictured him sifting through the past, soot-streaked and regal, desperate to find himself amongst the wreckage.

Though he was so much bigger, she gathered him up in her arms. Her fingers stroked through his hair. “What a horrible legacy. What a horrible, horrible man.”

“He paid for his weakness.” She felt the stiffness in his spine and in his words, and what he swore behind them. _I will not._

They stood in silence, listening to a tale of long-dead love, until his gloves whispered across her dress.

With great care, he cradled the small of her back in one monstrous hand, and took her wrist from around his neck with the other. She savored the stretch in her fingers as he laced them with his, the realness of the cool leather against her skin as, more slowly than breath, he began to wind them around the room.

“Silly Sith,” through her closed eyes, she smiled. “What in the Galaxy are you doing?”

His answer choked harshly under the hush of her long gown trailing on the tile. “Dancing.”

“Dancing,” she repeated. Her smile widened. “Ludicrous.”

It was strange at first, his short, shuffling footsteps that followed the tender plink of the music. Like sword fighting almost, but a thousand times softer. His cheek laid down in her hair, she pressed her ear against his chest and listened to the savage drumbeat of his heart. Time wound down to nothing.

“Kylo,” she whispered.

“Shh. I feel it too.”

Scenes from her visions swept over her mind like sand shifting over the hardscape. Of his face twisted in agony. Of his big, black body torn apart by Darkness. Of all the stars going out at once.

She tried to stem the pictures with words, but her voice was like her power. Fragile and too small. “Does it have to be like this?”

Even smaller. “Do you have to be Dark?”

His feet stopped. She missed the motion of their bodies like breathing.

He answered her patiently, cherishingly, with religious conviction. “Yes.”

She lifted her head and looked up into his eyes. His dark, damned eyes.

“But you’ll die,” she whispered.

“Not if you love me.”

"Kylo-"

Their fingers untwined.

He cupped her cheek, tracing her chin with his thumb. “If you love me, I will live forever.”

Deep in the Lightest corner of her mind, where his Darkness could not reach for burning, she saw a man with warm skin and the gentlest eyes.

“Then I would be a traitor.”

_To the man I loved._

_Love._

_Loved._

“No.” He tipped up her chin, softly. “You would be merciful.”

“But you don’t deserve mercy,” her words were simple and uncruel. She searched his features and found his mother. His father. Herself, reflected in the lenses of his eyes. “Especially not from me.”

“No,” his fingers followed the curve of her neck. Beautifully, unbearably cold. “But that’s what makes you holy.”

Without meaning to, she touched his mark. “I’m not holy.”

He met her gaze, unafraid of what he saw inside it. And that made her afraid. “You are to me.”

She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him. It was the first kiss she'd ever given him freely. She held his cool tongue in her mouth.

Already, she was three weeks with his baby.

She laid her head down on his chest and closed her eyes, soaked in naked fear. Because everything she loved the wind blew away.

The music had stopped.

She shut her mind against the rising tide, praying the crush would kill her, but knowing in her heart, it would only drag her out into the endless ocean to drown slowly. Alone.

“Keep dancing me,” she said.

And he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe a tremendous amount of thanks to you. Yes, you. Thank you, for being encouraging and kind. 
> 
> You're a really good egg :)
> 
> And Vader is coming. I *promise*.


	26. Have Regard for the Covenant, for the Dark Places of the Land are Full of the Habitations of Violence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sanity: Pastel?  
> Pastel: *typing* "Mm?"  
> Might I ask what you are doing?  
> *still typing* "Writing."  
> I see. And what, praytell, do you call this... this?  
> *glances up at screen* "I, uh… art?"  
> Ah. Art is it? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like the redheaded lovechild of the town hall scene from The Nightmare Before Christmas and blatant, unsolicited, untagged Monster-kink.  
> *slurps coffee* "Stephen King writes cool shit."  
> You, madam, are no Stephen King. This is madness.  
> *typing again* "Kayne West says never apologize for my artistic choices."  
> I emphatically doubt he was speaking to you.  
> "...."

"I am here, dear one. Speak your desire."

Terror throttled her words. She juddered, from freezing cold and from the raw, naked horror twisting her guts. She raised her husband’s saber, drawing its light up Darth Vader’s figure that seemed to stretch on forever into darkness.

All round her, the Dark shifted, black and shapeless, spanning outward in all directions as it closed in like a slow-curling fist. A black animus of sensual rasps and insidious murmurs bubbled within it, too low to distinguish, but filling her belly with fear. There was a presence in this place, a kind of evil she'd only glimpsed inside her husband’s eyes the night he whispered, “Thank you” to his father, and as he raised his saber to strike down his mother, and in those early days, when he’d fist his hand savagely through her hair and hold her down screaming-

Her heart hammered. She rasped for air through the thick miasma of rent ozone around the laser’s ravening edge, as his breath clunked in the silence, at just half the speed of her rabbit-heart.

_Curr-hah… curr-hah… curr-hah…_

“Darkness,” she licked her lips. She held her husband's sword like a torch. “I need your help-”

“It was most unwise to come here,” he stepped closer inside the ring of laser light, “without Son of Smuggler."

"Come,” he reached, “I shall guide you back to the Light.”

Behind her, someone snickered.

 _Something’s wrong._ Her Light trembled, as a lamb surrounded by wolves in the night. _This is not his Darkness._

“Don’t-” she brought up her husband’s saber into a defensive position, as she’d seen him do before. Her eyes stared down the jagged edge of its blade, face bisected by the bloody glare of its cross-guard. She edged back into nothingness, dragging the sphere of laser light with her. “Don’t come closer.”

From somewhere above them, a bemused voice asked, _“Who is this little Light?”_

A hiss answered, _"Jedi bitch."_

 _“It is Son of Smuggler’s_ beloved _,”_ mocked a third. _“It bears his heir.”_

 _“Abomination!”_ gasped a fourth.

 _“Half-breed Jedi-lover,”_ a fifth spat, _“Disgrace.”_

 _“Now now, Darth Atticus,”_ sneered the sixth, _“Siths in glass ships…”_

“Siths,” she whispered, breathing in panicked bursts as she squinted out into the black. Her terror doubled, and doubled again. Her heart tried to scramble through her chest.

“What is this place?” she asked Darth Vader.

“I told you, dear one. This is no place for your Light.”

Something cold brushed her shoulder.

She shrieked and whirled. “Don't touch me!”

She lashed out with her husband’s saber, lacerating the dark with fast-fading scars of red light. “I mean it-”

 _“Ooo, she_ means _it.”_

_“Her power is weak, even for a Jedi.”_

_“She’s only a whelpling.”_

_“Twinkle twinkle little star, does Smuggler’s Son know where you are?”_

They crowed like vultures.

She spun again, seeking Darth Vader by the glow of the laser.

He was closer now, so close that when she craned back, she could make out the gaps in the grill of his mask.

Her lips trembled. She tried to control the clatter of her teeth.

_Fear is the path to the Dark Side, peace is the path to the Light. Fear is the path to the Dark Side, peace is the path to the Light..._

_Don’t let them sense your fear._

“Please, Lord Vader. Release my husband.”

There were more sniggers and a few _ah-ha’s_ from the Darkness beyond.

 _“So,”_ smirked one voice, _“it’s here for Son of Smuggler.”_

 _“Oh dear,”_ another grinned, _“should we tell her? Oh no, it’s too cruel…”_

“You have come in vain, Lightchild,” Darth Vader gestured out at the Dark.

It slithered around her, the long, thick coils of an unseen serpent winding tighter.

“He walks where no Light can follow. Already, his transformation has begun.”

Her bones ached from shaking. She pinned her elbows to her sides and clamped her thighs together, forcing herself to stand taller. “No.”

“No?”

She lifted her chin.

She had failed Master Skywalker.

She had failed the Galaxy.

She _would not fail_ her husband.

“That Sith made vows to me. He cannot break them.” She raised her voice to be heard over the chorus of cackles and howls that had erupted, “He belongs to me. Him, and his Darkness.”

Her hands wrung the hilt of his saber. The metal was cold and slick with her sweat. “Release him now. I command you.”

The roar of raucous caws was deafening.

 _"Oh, it_ commands _Us.”_

_“Begging your pardon, little Highness.”_

_“Perhaps We should teach Son of Smuggler’s_ beloved _her place...”_

A voice whispered straight down her ear, _“Spare the rod, spoil the child.”_

Fear licked electric down her spine. She jolted and whirled, lashing blindly with her husband’s blade.

“Dear one,” a smile rippled through the sieve of Darth Vader’s mask. “You may be the soul of my heir, but We do not bow to your power. To Us, you are but the Light of the furthest star. Infinitesimally small.”

Her Light flickered like a candle guttering in the wicked wind.

She fought the warble in her mouth with a snarl. “You have to stop this! You’re killing him!”

 _“Aw, afraid there’ll be no one left to love you?”_ another whisper, this time near her nape, “ _Don’t cry, little baby. We’ll keep you cold at night when Papa’s gone-“_

She swallowed a retch. “Please, _stop_.”

Darth Vader raised his hand. The jeering and sniggers tapered to silence.

He spoke, “The smuggler’s son must die to weakness, before he can claim his true strength. Only then, can he fulfill his destiny.”

Her heart clenched. She swiped viciously at her eyes with the back of her shaking hand and spat, “What destiny?”

“As the final bringer of Darkness.” He gestured out at the Dark. “He is the Last Great Sith.”

Beyond the cast of light, the Darkness shifted and groaned, a harsh, grating, metallic sound, like the collapse of an empire.

 _"The last,”_ their reverent whispers clambered over each other.

“You’re wrong,” she snarled. The tears that dripped off her lashes sizzled softly in the cold. She bared her teeth. “I’ve seen his future. He is not the last great Sith. His Darkness will destroy him if he doesn't-”

_“No.”_

_“Not his Darkness.”_

_“His soul.”_

The voices receded, until only Darth Vader’s mechanical breath punctured the silence.

“Me? Destroy him?” she shook her head. “You’re lying. That's not possible.”

Freezing sweat trickled in streams down her back. Her dress peeled away and slipped across her skin. She wrung the hilt of her husband’s saber. “I _can’t_ kill him. He’s too powerful-”

“Search your feelings.” His mask tilted down at her. His voice, if possible, grew deeper. It was as if he spoke from inside her heart. “You know it to be true.”

Her heart fell through her feet, down into the Darkness beyond.

“No-” she tried to strangle her sob, but it broke through with a gasp. “I won’t kill him, I won’t-”

 _“Sith-killer,”_ they began to whisper, with loathing grins. _“Sith-killer. Sith-killer. Sith-killer -”_

She saw her husband collapsed on the East Bridge, his big, black body crumpled and convulsing. She heard his words from when she woke, always the same, _Good morning, my darling_. His fond, lopsided sneer as she'd warbled back, _How was your sleeping?_

 _Easy,_ he would say.

Her Light swelled, a blue star raging against the endless night. Inside his saber, her husband’s kyber hissed and rattled. Its ragged edge flared, biting back at the darkness with razoring teeth.

The voices drew back, hissing.

“Release him,” she screamed, raising his sword, “Or I will destroy you! All of you!”

“Your loyalty to the Dark One is most impressive.” Darth Vader’s figure began to fade back into the perfect dark. “But his destiny lies with the Dark Side.”

Shadow eclipsed him. “And yours with the Light.”

“Wait!”

Her heart stopped and strangled.

The temperature fell further. Her lungs ached with cold and she coughed.

 _I’m going to die here,_ she realized.

Fighting the white-knuckled grip of hysteria, she forced herself to close her eyes. She pictured a desert, hot, colorless atmosphere and endless, lonely sand. Far ahead on the horizon, a dark figure wavered in the heat.

The Siths were clamoring, a thousand filthy fingers clawing at her Light.

She laid her hand on her belly, over her baby, and concentrated on the figure in the distance.

_Kylo. Kylo Ren._

The figure turned towards her.

She played back his murmur, thick and deep, picturing the want in his soulless eyes as he'd said, _To have and to hold. T_ _o_ _love and to cherish. To honor and to protect-_

He was racing now, his black cowl billowing out behind him, leaving a trail of shimmering dust that drifted upwards to touch the sun. From a faraway Galaxy, he was shouting, _Rey-_

 _You promised me_ , the wind carried her whisper to him across the sands. _Kylo, you promised._

_For better or worse. For richer or poorer-_

Something happened, something she'd never seen on Jakku, in sixteen long, lonely years. The sky darkened with a storm. 

_In sickness and in health. For all the days of my life-_

Lightning struck the sands, making the most beautiful glass structure she'd ever seen. Tall and glimmering, it rose to kiss the sinister sky.

Her eyes opened.

Out in the static night, where Darth Vader had stood, something was moving, deeper than the perfect black, a mammoth shadow sluicing through dark waters.

The voices hushed each other.

As the blackness drew closer, it took shape against the softer dark. Its aura was achingly familiar.

The kyber in her hand trembled.

“Kylo?”

He stepped into the ring of light.

She folded at his feet.

In the fearful leap of his laser, he loomed naked above her. His body was broader, even more bestial than before, he seemed to stretch upwards forever into darkness above her. His skin had ashed to the color of mist crawling out of the valley, bruising to twilight’s blue-dark where it was thinnest - under his eyes, in the crease of his elbows, at his temples and around his mouth. Fine fissures webbed outwards from the faded edges, mottling his wide, hewn body with a map of his power.

She followed the line his muscles cleaved deep into his torso up towards his chest, where her mark burned freshly-branded across his pec. Her slash blazed in his bisected face, wrung horribly by the black smirk he wore. Through the wet, snarled strands of his long hair, his eyes bore down at her. Nothing, neither the light of his sword nor of her waning aura, reflected in their lenses.

Her heart ached in the way she called love for his dark, familiar stare.

“It is you,” she whispered.

He raised his hands.

Strikes of cold blue light seared between, their snarling crackle deafening to her ears as they swelled and multiplied.

His saber roared in her hands.

She felt no fear.

Slowly, he raised his arms, palms spreading wider and wider as cold lightning continued to balloon outward around her, pressing back the edges of the Dark.

As his Darkshear arced high above them, she looked out into Darkness and saw, with each blue-flamed flash, the thousand faces of the Sith. Like moths, they courted blindly at the violent pulses of light, incinerating in their fire. Their wails and howls of ecstasy became the black psalm for her husband’s titanic power.

She stared up at him in awe, blue waves flashing in her wide, wet eyes.

Nothing, not a new generation of Jedi, or an army of man, or a legion of Sith, could ever kill him.

He would live to love her forever.

“Hey Sith.”

His chin tipped downward. He stared into her with lightless eyes.

She gave him a tremulous smile. “Are you just going to stand there... naked... making lightning with your hands? Because- because I’m hungry.”

He grinned. Between his bruised lips, his teeth gleamed startlingly white.

_Beautiful._

He bent down and took her little waist in the monstrous span of his hands. She lifted up, up into the air, heart climbing with her, higher and higher as he raised her above him. His Darkshear was over, they were surrounded by smoke and the stifling stench of scorched ozone, still bathed by the hellish glare of his vermillion aura and her own pale blue Light.

She laid her hands on his shoulders.

His skin was still slick from the clinging waters of the bacta tank. He was freezing.

Slowly, he floated her down into his arms.

Her heart reached for him through her ribs as he enfolded her.

Tucked inside her womb, their baby thrummed between them.

_Safe._

“Lunatic,” she chided, breathless, chin trembling, tears streaking her cheeks. “You’re dripping wet.”

“I heard you, Rey.” He laid his forehead on hers. Wonderfully and abominably cold. “I heard you.”

“I knew you would come,” she framed his face. "They said you wouldn't, but I knew you. I knew."

His eyes closed. "Rey."

Under the cover of impenetrable dark, she kissed him. Over and over and over.

_Fuck Darth Vader, the Darkness and the Empire. Fuck Master Skywalker and the Light, Leia and the Resistance, the Jedi and the Sith. Fuck the sacred texts and the holy orders. Fuck destiny._

_Fuck the Force._

She would not kill her husband.

She would not.

She would not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dark!Kylo is inspired in looks by the art of this talented gal: http://kittrose.tumblr.com/
> 
> Her gorgeous Dark!Kylo can be viewed here: http://kittrose.tumblr.com/image/175500171742
> 
> C'mon, try a little Dark Sith erotica with your ol' pal Pastel. I promise you'll like it :>
> 
> Thank you for dropping a line. I love reading your comments.


	27. Event Horizon: A Theoretical Boundary Around a Black Hole Beyond Which No Light Can Escape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sanity: Ah-hem  
> Pastel: *typing* "Yeah?"  
> Sanity: You wait practically a month to update this abomination you deem to call "art", and when you finally do, not only are your descriptions recycled and your language trite, but you have actually sodomized science.  
> Pastel: *snaps gum* "Nuh-huh. I totally know what I'm talking about. I was an astromony minor, remember?"  
> Sanity: You took *one* astronomy elective in college which consisted of you standing on the Physics Building and staring stupidly at the moon whilst declaring, "Yep, that is the moon."  
> Pastel: ..... ..... ..... "Oh yeah."  
> Sanity: Idiot.

_“Floor one hundred, West Hanger, Main Bridge.”_

“So this is it then? _This_ is how you die?” her voice trembled. Tucked in at his side, she crossed her arm under her breasts and huffed. “Because it’s absolutely ludicrous. Even for you.”

He looked down at his little beloved. The elevator’s red emergency lighting burnished her golden skin to the same sunfire hue as his aura. Her eyes looked larger in the hellish light, strange and luminous.

She was violently beautiful, draped in black glimmering fabric and hung with jewels that twinkled like sharp teeth in the blue-hued light. His red diamond glinted on her married finger like a freshly culled heart, as crystals the color of her gown trembled around her neck and in her hair. A brooch with his empire’s insignia was pinned above her breast.

He let his eyes wander down her body, lingering where his baby lay sleeping in her warm, sacred dark. Love, barb-edged and rankling, unfurled in his gut.

The last little Sith-killer. Empress of the Galaxy.

Queen of his heart.

“You are so fucking beautiful.”

With tender care, he bowed and took her ribcage in his monstrous grasp, lifting her up off her feet until their eyes were level. Her arms wrapped around him on reflex, as her breasts pressed up and together above the neck of her dress. Beneath his hand, her heart fluttered like a bird trapped under glass.

“When you look like this, I want to make love to you forever.”

Her lips parted, her lashes flickered with disbelief. “A-are you stupid? Are you mad? You’re about to commit suicide, and this- _sex_ , that’s what you’re yabbering about?”

She glanced pointedly at his raiment. “Look at you, idiot, you’re not even _dressed_.”

It was _mostly_ untrue. He did not wear his uniform – even if it _could_ fit, it was inconceivable to think he’d dress like something other than what he was. The days of pretending he was merely an emperor or an autocrat were over.

The long tunic that was the trademark of Darth Lords strained to reach past his knees. His new breadth stretched its woven polyfibers to their limit. Beneath it, his black leggings molded to his glutes and the thick, powerful bulge of his calves and thighs. His feet were bare on the elevator floor, arms naked under the glaze of the red light. He wore no gloves.

His leatherware was tailored to a much smaller man.

Something slithered, liquid and fast, between his flesh and bone. A black-scaled serpent skimming the surface of dark waters.

 _Invincible,_ whispered the Dark. It’s voice came from within his heart.

“-don’t even understand what you’re capable of. Are you hearing me? _Kylo_ -”

A fond smirk wrenched the rent half of his face as he met her eyes. “Why Rey of Jakku, what a disturbing lack of faith you have.”

She sobbed, “You stupid ass-”

The doors opened. _“Please watch your step as you exit.”_

He caught her softly under the knees and cradled her before ducking through the doorway.

“Supre-he-heem L-leader…” the General faltered mid-salute. His face went slack in horror, as did the face of every other admiral, colonel, and joint chief gathered on the bridge. “My… God. What has happened?”

Ren smirked, squinting through the searing glare of the bright overhead lights.

_Darkness-_

Hundreds of feet above them, the florescent tubing swelled and shattered. A tinkling rain of polyglass followed a shower of white sparks down onto the bridge and troopers gathered in the hanger below it.

Inside his arms, beneath the protective sphere of his aura, Rey screamed. The General and his cabinet covered their heads and drew back with shouts and gasps.

Emergency lighting spaced across the walls and in tracks along the floor flickered to life.

Ren hitched his trembling wife higher up his chest. She ratcheted her arms around his neck and buried her face in his cowl.

“Is everyone here?” he asked.

Struggling to control his terror, the General raised his chin. He squinted through the low vermillion light, unable to hide the manic tick in his eye as he assured him, “All are present and accounted for.”

“Take us down.”

His commanders gave him and his wife wide passage down the bridge, their terrified chatter rising up from their minds like an unkindness of ravens startled by blaster-shot. They hid their shaking hands behind their backs or inside their jackets, risking sideways glances at their Supreme Leader and at each other only after their Queen spoke.

“Is- is that our full fleet?” she twisted and craned over her shoulder to see through the plexi-plastic wall down into the hanger. Her long glimmering train swept softly through the glass as he walked.

In regimental file, two thousand Stormtroopers, the active duty fleet aboard the _Finalizer_ , filled the entire bay and its docking stations. They faced the open dock door, and the sprawl of space beyond.

“Yes,” he loped barefoot amongst the shards until they boarded the lift. Warily, his cabinet filed in after.

The jewels in her hair tinkled musically as they lurched into a descent. She tightened around him.

He dipped his mouth next to her ear and murmured, “Don’t be afraid.”

Her mouth trembled. Tears dripped down her face in earnest. “But I am. Kylo, I’m so afraid.”

When the lift ground to a halt, his commanders and joint chiefs deboard and parted. He stepped out into the corrugated durasteel at the rear of his fleet. Through the long, stark aisle made by their ranks, he looked out through the titanic transpara-barrier. There, against the star-pricked backdrop of space, danced a technicolored aurora of bright, nebulous light.

The cradle of a new star.

 _It is time,_ the Darkness sluiced below his skin, _to show them what we are._

Rey stared fear-filled at the hanger’s gaping, toothless mouth, through the invisible barrier that was the only thing separating them from frozen space. The shifting colors of the nebula reflected in her eyes, and on the thousands of white armored Stormtroopers.

But the only light in his eyes was hers. “Rey, my darling.”

She looked at him. Her body quaked, she was sobbing too much to speak.

 _There, there, dear one,_ the Darkness crooned. _You will see soon enough._

He carried her past line-after-line of his fleet. They were a brutal sight, him in his new, titanic form with naked arms and bare feet, hair sleek and stranded from the slick waters of the bacta tank, and his scavenger queen, the little Cimmerian sunchild, crying softly in his arms.

A black tide of terror rolled up through the rows of his soldiers as he lurched through their ranks, Rey's long gown slithering behind them like the glimmering tail of a dark dragon. Up ahead, Captain Phasma’s chrome suit of armor glowed red-hot in the light. Her savage pride swelled out beyond her body to meet him.

“Supreme Leader,” she saluted him with zealous force. He could hear the malevolent smile that split her gnarled face in two as she tilted back her helmet to take in his transformation, “You are _magnificent_.”

He smiled, wrenching the brand on his face. “Thank you, Captain.”

Tenderly, he set Rey on her feet beside her.

She refused to let him go. “Kylo, I’m begging you, don’t-”

“Shh.” He engulfed her face in his hands. Her fingers twisted inside his cowl. “I’ll come back.”

“This is a nightmare,” she choked out, shoulders shaking. “I lost you once. I cannot- Kylo, I cannot.”

“You won’t.” He stroked her hair. Her grief was so beautiful. “Trust me.”

“Oh right,” she slapped the tears off her cheeks and snapped breathlessly, “because that’s what our marriage is based on, trust. You know what?" she snarled, lips quivering, "I hope you die. And I hope they remember you as the stupidest Sith to ever live because I-”

He kissed her, long and deep.

She wrenched his cowl and pressed her tongue desperately down his throat.

The sensual sound their lips made as they parted echoed across the hanger.

“You are my heart, Rey of Jakku. Daughter of none. Queen of my all." He looked into her wide, beautiful eyes. “You are the only one I have ever loved.”

Her hands followed as he stepped away, “Kylo, no, _no_ -”

Through the transpara-barrier, he stared out into the belly of the star. The gaseous tentacles of its nebula spanned outward in all directions. Their light stretched his eyes and made his Darkness hiss and bare its fangs.

He stepped through the barrier out into darkness as his wife screamed for him to stop.

Silence, weightless and perfect, enveloped him like a lover.

The cold needled through every one of his cells. His lungs spasmed at the nothingness. Shoving back the reflex to convulse, he held completely still and let the killing combination of temperature hundreds of degrees below zero and the absence of oxygen spread like black frost through bone and organ. His heart thudded, fast and dull, in his throat and behind his eyes.

He closed them, listening with detached wonder as his pulse plummeted. Then, for one excruciating, eternal second, his heart ceased to beat at all.

He felt no fear.

_Darkness-_

_We are here, Son._

The black serpent circled his lungs and undulated, moving the soft tissue in dark parody of breathing. Its tail coiled around his heart and pumped, its long tongue licked through his veins, pushing along his blood.

His fingers twitched. He curled his hands into fists and opened his eyes.

_Immortal._

_Yes._ The Great Dark gave him a feral, fatherly smile. _We are. Welcome home, Our Son. Welcome home._

He looked around him, in every direction, at the cosmos unfurling at his feet.

_Kingdom._

He thought of the baby, his baby, tucked within his wife. Of all his children, great future Siths, who would mount the universe he took for them.

_Dynasty._

_Let us show them,_ spoke the Great Dark, _Show them all what is to come._

Ahead of him, the newborn star in the great kaleidoscope eye of the nebula trembled.

Kylo Ren raised his hands.

_Peace is a lie, there is only passion._

His Darkness slithered forward, wending its way between tendrils of light like a snake into the cradle. 

_Through passion, I gain strength._

It sank its teeth into the heart of the star and dragged the energy towards him. The Light shrieked and screamed, clawing as it tried to kick away. Hot flashes of white flame licked over the surface of the sun.

_Through strength, I gain power-_

Through his fingertips, up his arms and down into his body, he absorbed the Light of the star.

_Through power, I gain victory._

The sun shivered and bled from its center, energy pouring outward in an angry, festering red that swelled beyond the border of its cradle. He savored the tearing strain in his eyes.

_Through victory, my chains are broken._

Atoms rioting inside the star burst through its gravity and scattered, changing color as they separated and moved apart, forming a brilliant supernova that spanned outward and caught in the churn of Darkness circling him like the eye of a whirlpool. No matter how flexible or nebulous it became, the Light could not escape him.

He smiled, _The Force shall set me free._

With a final groan, like that of the last Jedi temple, the nova folded and bowed to him. Its center became a vortex with energy the same signature as his own.

A black hole.

Inside him, the power of the new sun was tremendous. It pushed tissue and cells apart, expanding him, rearranging him. He burned in its sweltering blaze, and the glory.

Opening his hands, he raised them above him, as slowly, the Darkness cooled the desperate, pleading thrash of the sun’s atoms to frozen ash. The Light died within him.

 _Anointed,_ whispered the Dark when it was done.

All around them, the stars wept.

Through the transpara-barrier, he saw his cabinet and generals fallen on their hands and knees, and the Captain kneeling proudly among them, mirrored by his fleet of two thousand soldiers behind her.

His wife stood at the barrier. Her hand was pressed against her mouth, the other protected her belly.

Through the span of space, their eyes met.

She was weeping with the stars. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren has reached his final form. 
> 
> The Last Jedi has a choice to make.
> 
> Pastel is extremely dramatic. 
> 
> That is all.


	28. We'd Be So Less Fragile If We're Made from Metal and Our Hearts from Iron and Our Minds from Steel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What-what in the butt!

He had to find her through the Force.

She was waiting with an ambush inside the command room.

Hovering above the entire length of the center console, and on every terminal lining the walls, three-dimensional holoforms acted out silent scenes from his campaigns around the Galaxy. Fleets of Stormtroopers carrying blasters and laser canons deplaning by the thousands. Airstrikes dropping bombs over rebel bases. Acres of lush forests, teeming with sentient life, on fire. Temples desecrated. Palaces and cities tore down by war machines. Troopers in gleaming white driving terrified civilians - the aged and the sick, women with their screaming babies and children - into the sea to drown.

The phantoms of his empire.

At the center of it all, cast in their eerie blue light, stood his wife.

“Rey.” He had to bend to clear the door. 

“What, Kylo?” She was watching an image of villagers being rounded up in the Jakku desert. Behind the firing line, he saw himself give the order in his mask and dark raiment.

The villagers were executed by blaster.

She turned and looked at him, blue holo light flickering on the surface of her gold, glassine eyes. “What do you want now?" she sneered, "Son of Smuggler.”

His eyes narrowed. “Who told you that name?”

She snorted, a short, hate-filled sound. “Who do you think?”

Her contempt reached him through the sifting darkness as she mocked, “It’s time to let old things die? The Jedi. The _Sith-_ ”

“Rey-”

“Join me.” She wrenched a tablet off the table and threw it at him.

He lifted his hand. It changed direction and smashed into pieces against a wall.

“Join me and we’ll bring a new order to the Galaxy. Is this-” she flung her hands at the images around the room, “what you meant? Is this your glorious _empire_ -”

She picked up another tablet.

“Rey,” tiredly, he rubbed his hand over his face, “that’s enough. Take control of your emotions.”

Her lashes flickered, but her tears would not fall. They clung on, flashing silver in the blue glaze of the holograms.“You... are a _monster._ A beast. You are not my husband-”

She threw the tablet at him with all her might.

This time, when he raised his hand, it dropped mid-air like a bird suddenly struck.

The pieces scattered out across the tile.

“Rey, my darling,” he spoke very softly, palms pressing down at the floor, “you’ve had a long, long day. You're very tired-”

“No,” she shook her head, gasping through her sob, “No no no I’m finally awake. All this time, those disgusting _snakes_ have been hiding in that room, hissing and crawling and… _whispering_ , and you’ve gone in there to be with them, _every day_.”

It took him a moment to understand what she meant. "The Siths."

"Those _demons_ ," she bared her teeth around her words. Her hands spanned up and down, indicating his new titanic height. “And look at what they’ve made you. Look at what you’ve _become_.”

"Rey. Beloved-"

Grief cracked her face. She covered her eyes and sobbed.

He laid his hand on his chest, over his heart. "Look at me, it's me. It's still me."

"No," crying, she shook her head. Her small, shattered bleating broke his heart. "You killed him. You killed my husband-”

_Why is she doing this? How can she still not understand?_

_It is her nature_ , the Dark answered. Its tone was tender and fond. _For that which We love her, is the reason she cannot comprehend Us. She is simple, uncorrupted._ _She is the Light._

“Rey, Rey-baby. Look at me,” he waited until she did, and then he pressed his heart into every single word, willing her with his eyes to understand, "I have _always_ been this. And I have _always_ loved you. From the moment I saw you in the forest, I loved you. This-" he gestured around the room at his triumphs, "this _is_ our destiny. It always was. Don't you see?" 

He stretched out his hand. His gut clenched at the way she backed away from him as he advanced. "It's all for you. For us. Everything I have done or will ever do is for us-"

“No, no- stay away from me!” she stumbled backwards through a hologram, fragments of its scene projected onto her skin as she bared her teeth at him and snarled, “I mean it, stay away!”

His chest cinched. He stopped, letting his hand hang between them, his skin almost black in the shifting shadows. Beneath it, he felt his Darkness sluice and coil.

“Rey, that’s enough. It's over."

“Because you _ruined_ it. You ruined everything! The Balance-”

“There is no _balance!_ ” he roared, his outstretched hand flexing savagely as his patience stretched and snapped. “Can’t you see that? Can’t you _feel_ that? Balance is a lie, the Jedi are a _lie_! There is nothing but weakness and power.”

He came closer, throat working as he looked down on her. The most precious thing in the universe. The only one he truly wanted to know him. The one who never could.

His deep murmur beseeched her, begged her, “You were too weak, that is why you lost. I gave you so many chances-”

She gasped a bitter, breathless laugh, “Oh yes, to _join you_ -”

“To defeat me. And you couldn’t. You don’t have the strength. I am stronger than my grandfather ever dreamt of becoming. But you?” he shook his head. There was no malice in his words, only sadness. Only truth. “You’re nothing. You were always nothing. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. You would not _hear me_ ,” he enunciated slowly, clearly, through his teeth. “You let my mother use you like weapon. When you couldn’t give her what she wanted – her son, dead – she threw you away like garbage. Just like your parents. Rey,” he stepped closer. His hand cupped her face. “I am the only one who has ever loved you. The only one.”

“I should have killed you on Starkiller,” she was whispering not at him, but to herself. Her arms hugged around her belly as she muttered, shaking. Behind her pale, trembling lips, her teeth chattered. “I should have killed you- I should have-”

His heart burned cold and shattered. Unable to bare it, he raised his fingers.

"Hush now. You need to sleep."

She flinched, “Don’t-”

"You'll feel better in the morning," he murmured as his fingers stroked her hair.

She fainted into his arms.

 

 

 

 

 

Her small body swayed in his arms as he bore her through the halls.

Though every corridor was empty, a miasma of fear swamped the naked hallways. Over the heavy slap of his bare feet on the tile, the mechanical buzz of the ship and the tinkle of her adornments seemed loud inside the silence.

Within this mind, he heard the terrified thoughts of his subjects, like a dark, sensual whisper at either ear.

_Unstoppable-_

_Inhuman-_

_Abomination-_

_-cannot strike against him now or he will crush us all-_

_-does he know what we were plotting-_

_-have to leave before he finds us-_

_-new reign of terror across the Galaxy-_

_-the end of everything we know-_

Rey's eyes in the flickering darkness loomed at the end of every hall.  _I should have killed you on Starkiller-_

He looked down at her sleeping form. The life within her was like the pinprick of a star far, far away from where he stood.

Unwanted, he remembered the very last time the Force connected them through their bond.

He was standing under his lofted TIE Fighter, inspecting a modification, when he heard the tell-tale ring. Her body, brown and filthy against the brilliant gleam of his empty hanger, appeared under the opposite wing.

She looked away from him as she spoke.

“ _I’m going to marry you.”_

His heart, his treacherous fucking heart, stopped.

Time ceased to exist. The universe slowed down and dissolved.

Afraid to breathe, afraid to blink, he'd cocked his head and sneered, _“I'm sorry,_ _come again?”_

“ _You heard me, hideous beast,”_ she snarled. Her face was wet. She’d been crying.

She crossed her arms, jamming her fists under her biceps and digging them against her ribs.

“ _I said I’m marrying you,”_ she was still speaking to the lift on the far wall. “ _Since I can’t kill you, and I can’t get the nerve to kill myse-”_ her voice broke off abruptly. She covered her mouth with her hand.

His breath shook.

He raised his chin. “ _Oh? And who says I’ll still have you?”_

She snorted. “ _Sith, please_.”

She stared him down now. Her wrapping were in tatters, she looked like she hadn’t bathed in days. Or eaten.

Still, he had his pride.

Dressed in casual, pristine black, he propped his foot on a gleaming mechanic’s cart and tucked his thumbs into the pockets of his slacks. “ _You can do better than that. Scavenger.”_

“ _You_ -” she spat, disgust twisting her pretty face into something desperate and beautiful, “ _you think I’ll beg you, you sick animal? You ugly cocksucking happabore fucker-”_

“ _Why Rey of Jakku_ ,” he smirked, “ _what a little sweet-talker you are. No wonder my father wanted you for himself_.”

His eyes flicked over her as rancid hate coated his mouth. “ _You’re exactly his type_.”

“ _And what does that say about you, the mighty Kylo Ren? Jerking off his cock to a scavenger. Begging her to be his_ empress _."_ She spat, _"You're pathetic._ "

He sauntered up to her slowly, savoring how she bared her teeth but flinched away. How she trembled, despite knowing he could not come completely through their bond.

Force knew he'd tried.

He didn't stopped until he was almost on top of her. This close to her, his Darkness thrashed and his cock thrummed. She was the only one who made him like this.

Fully alive.

At his dark smirk, she winced. _"Yet here you are."_

She looked down at the durasteel. Her voice was hollow and small. “ _I’m on Tatooine_. _With your mother-"_ the word sounded bitter in her mouth. _"She and the other Resistance leaders are prepared to accept your offer."_

He murmured, _"Tell me where you are."_

 _"In a bunker in the Northern Sector. North of Great Dune City."_ She lifted her chin, her proud gaze somewhere just above his shoulder. "We _have no food or water so unless you'd like to marry a corpse, I suggest you hurry the fuck up.”_

Faster than she could react, he swept his big hand up her hip to hold the dip of her waist, as he wound the other through her hair and kissed her.

He felt her small, firm breasts against his chest, tasting grease and grit and her warm, sweet breath.

She shook in his black embrace as he promised, “ _I’ll see you in six hours_."

“ _Wonderful_ ,” she snapped, mouth warbling as she could no longer hold back her sob. “ _Brilliant. Oh I can hardly wait_.”

The bond closed before he could ask, _Then why are you weeping?_

 

 

Back inside their apartment, he laid her down on the sectional in their living room.

On the table beside it, his coffee cup abandoned from the morning sat next to the tablet she practiced her reading from at night.

_"Bah-but if you t-tah… hay... mmuh-"_

_"Tame."_

_"But if you tame me, we sh-shall need each oth-er…."_

 

 

Outside the room, he stopped and stared down the hallway.

The doors to his meditation room were open. Inside, a light was on. It cut at an angle across the dark tile.

The room was empty now.

The Darkness was all inside him.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He stood on the West Bridge, high above the colossal hanger, watching a maintenance droid repair the body of a Star Destroyer. The droid worked methodically around the hull, scanning for shrapnel and applying patches with blasts of heat from its soldering iron. Sparks leapt and sputtered against the backdrop of the open hanger door, mixing with the stars.

Would Han Solo have been impressed by any of it?

“You’re thinking about your father.”

He turned. “Captain.”

Her helmet was tucked beneath her arm. From a bed of twisted flesh, her lone blue eye studied him closely.

He asked her quietly, “How can you tell?”

“You have that look you get when you think of him,” she drew to close and stopped. It was a strange sensation, looking down at Phasma from his new height. They’d always stood eye-to-eye.

A wry smirk pursed his scar. “Enlighten me.”

“You’re eyes are sad,” she tilted her head, her gaze moving back and forth over his face, “But you’re smiling.”

He snorted. “If you say so.”

She took a breath, turning out to the scene inside the hanger. “Sir. Might I speak candidly?”

His lips twitched. “You might.”

“In my career, I have raised thousands of soldiers, and I can say, without doubt, there is no work more rewarding in all the Galaxy than the raising of one’s own.” She glanced up at him. Her look was uncharacteristically warm. "As you'll know for yourself, in due time."

He thought of his baby, growing strong and beautiful within his wife.

"Phasma," he grinned, "are you having a stroke?"

She lifted her chin. “Of all that I am proudest of, each of my men is the greatest. Now, you were never my soldier, and you are not my son. But I have loved you as one.”

His throat cinched.

Stunned, he glanced down at the droid and its welding as something close to a smile twisted what remained of her mouth. “There were those that doubted you, your conviction. Your strength. But I never did." She turned to him. "I looked into your eyes and saw the violence within your heart. Pure, ravenous and insatiable. That was over twenty years ago. And look at you now.” As her eye wandered over him, she swelled with pride.

“Phasma-”

“I am honored, that I have lived to see this. Thank you for resurrecting me, so that I could look upon you in this form with my own eye." Her mangled hand fell lightly on his arm. She smiled, a true, hideous, beautiful smile. "When Death comes for me, I shall go satisfied into its maw. Thank you.”

Something sharp and bittersweet unfurled in his chest. Just like that, he was a boy again, and she was whole, blazing magnificently above him as she reached down to pick him up off the practice room floor. “ _Twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds. You’re improving, Master Ren_.”

He swallowed and nodded. 

Together, they turned back to the hanger. Below them, the droid had finished its patchwork and was chill-blasting the hull.

When he could trust his voice, softly, he cleared his throat and spoke, “Do you know why I asked you to meet me here?”

“I think so.”

He looked out through the hanger at the stars. Their light seemed to shudder against the eternal dark.

This Empire, his grandfather’s Empire, was his birth right. He claimed it in Darth Vader's name. The Galaxy was his inheritance. 

But the universe would be his legacy.

Limitless galaxies and infinite worlds, ruled for all time by his children’s children’s children.

He would give them the stars behind the stars.

 _Dynasty_ , whispered the Dark.

“I need you to go back to Base, Captain, and oversee preparations on the Armada. We are accelerating our timelines.” He looked at her. “We launch our intergalactic campaign in ten months.”

“Ten months is extremely aggressive, sir,” her tone was deeply approving.

He nodded. “So are we.”

Her head cocked. “And Her Majesty's tour?"

That was Phasma. Always able to sniff out his weakness.

How he loved and hated her for it.

His jaw tightened, remembering Rey's words in the command room. “You were right. She’s not suited to this." He studied the spread of space beyond them. "Any of it.”

_She doesn’t have the strength._

“Well, I said it before, she was a _unique_ choice.”

He glanced at her, mouth quirking in amusement. “I think the words you used to Hux were _mouse-haired hillbilly breeder_.”

She snorted. “Huxy told on me? Rather unregimented of him."

The two shared a smirk.

Then her face sobered. "So? What will you do with her?”

He scrubbed his face. “I don’t know. She hates me, I know that. A tour will only make it worse. Maybe I can give her something else-”

_I've given her everything. What else could she want._

"Perhaps the child will-"

The harsh _bing_ of the elevator at the other end of the bridge cut her off.

“Supreme Leader!” General Hux clattered fast through the doors. He started towards them at a dead sprint, flanked by two Stormtroopers on either side. "Quickly, Captain! She's gone!"

Ren's heart slammed into his ribs. Despite his fast, gigantic strides, Phasma was first to meet the General at the midway.

The General only fumbled for a moment at the sight of her unmasked face and Ren’s still-new transformation before he leading them at an efficient pace towards the elevator. He kept his tone neutral, but his face was colorless and drawn. “She took the escape pod from the launch bay in your apartment, it breeched our shields at hyperspeed four minutes ago. I declined to sound the alarm, for reasons that should be obvious to you both.”

Ren snarled, “Where is she taking it?”

“Someone is checking the coordinates-” he jerked himself aside to avoid being mowed down as Ren crashed over the elevator's threshold.

The carriage lurched and groaned.

Phasma was right behind him.

Ren's heart pounded, his too-large fingers stumbling shaking over the control pad. "God fucking _damnit_ -"

"Let me," Phasma wedged in-between to enter the series of numbers for his private apartments.

His blood rushed, and below it, an undercurrent of Darkness raged like a riptide. With an anguished roar, he raised his fist-

"My Lord, stop. Stop." Phasma had taken ahold of him.

He noticed Hux, vaguely. The General had molded himself to the opposite side of the carriage. His lips were white, eyes wild.

The voices were whispering, too fast and too many to understand.

_Why would she take an escape pod?_

_Why wouldn’t she take a ship from one of the hangers?_

_Because she knows each ship has a tracker._

"Shut up!" he snapped, turning and twisting, "Shut up, I can't-"

"My Lord," she was barking, "Take control of your emotions."

"Supreme Leader, we are running a decryption program now. We will find her-"

_Decryption program._

_She knows we can decrypt the coordinate program in the apartment’s launch bay._

_Why would she take the escape pod?_

_Why?_

_Why?_

_Unless-_

“Wait!” He reached out and slammed the stop button. The carriage shuddered and whipped to a halt, jolting Hux and Phasma sideways. “Hux-"

The man shrank into himself as Ren bore down on him. "Tell your men to stop decoding the coordinates, _now_.”

“What, why?”

“Tell them now!”

“Yes of course alright,” Hux pressed a juddering finger into the comm dial on his earpiece. “This is General Hux, cease and desist all attempts to decode the launch coordinates-”

Ren closed his eyes and gathered his power.

_Darkness-_

The boundary of his aura began to swell away from him.

"My Lord?"

“She didn’t take the escape pod in the apartment," Ren's eyes never opened. Already, his aura encompassed the West Tower and was rushing east. "She took the one on the Z-deck-”

“There’s a launch bay on the Z-deck?” Hux's voice wavered.

“The launch from the apartment is a decoy," Ren concentrated on pressing his Darkness towards the impending blast.

The bomb had already detonated.

"I programmed the terminal to self-destruct when a decryption program is run against its protocol-”

The entire ship lurched as first blast wave collided violently with his power.

“How big is the bomb?" asked the Captain. Her tone said she already knew the answer.

His lips twitched. "Big enough to blow the whole ship."

"Bloody hell!" cawed the General.

Ren pressed a greater wave of Darkness out to meet the second blast wave. He had no idea how many there'd be.

But he knew the North Tower was gone.

“Brace yourselves.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S'up? Miss me?
> 
> I missed you, homegirl. (Homeboy. Homeperson. Whatevah)
> 
> This chapter length is ridic, isn't it? But I was feelin' myself, soooo....
> 
> Also, if you were hanging on for a redemption arc... *cringes*


	29. Oh, I've Got A Brand New Pair of Rollerskates and You've Got a Brand New Key

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sanity: *pinching the bridge of its nose* Why do I even bother?  
> Pastel: *slurping coffee* "What?"  
> Sanity: First, you said seven chapters. Then, twelve. *Then*, twenty-eight...  
> Pastel: *nervous* "I- I didn't know how long it would take to say what I want to say-"  
> Sanity: *throws up hands* I am at a loss for words, madam, as to how exactly you live with yourself.  
> Pastel: "… but it's cool, right? I mean, c'mon, you gotta admit. I have like, the baddest Sith in Archive. That's cool. Right?"  
> Sanity: I am not going to dignify question that with an answer.

Rey dropped her head back and groaned. Her headdress tinkled, silver coins pattering like rain on the leaves of the Kashyykian forest. From her sideways angle, she smiled at him. _“What a ludicrous proposal.”_

He stood from his seat beside her and drew her smoothly to her feet. _“You say that every time.”_

 _“Do I?”_ she yawned. She laced her little fingers together. His gaze followed the graceful arc her arms made above her head, watching as she shut her eyes and sighed into the motion.

His chest ached. _She’s so beautiful._

 _Yes,_ agreed the Dark.

Unable to stop himself, he wound his arms around her waist and pressed her close, savoring the strain of her small, soft body against his stronger, broader one as she stretched.

They were the last two inside the conference room, the others had already left. Or maybe they were first, waiting on everyone else to arrive. He was having trouble remembering what they were there for…

 _It doesn’t matter_ , he decided, as his eyes traced the gentle swell of her breasts beneath her dress up to the elegant line of her throat. This piece he could perceive perfectly, in spite of the low, sinister buzzing at the back of his brain – her soft breathing, the long curl of her lashes against her cheeks, how they flickered like she was dreaming. Like a scene he'd seen a hundred times before, he knew it by heart.

Her lips parted sweetly as he murmured, _“Are you tired, my darling?”_

She opened her eyes and smiled again, her slight weight still suspended within the span of his hands. Her fingers floated down to touch his face, skimming the bridge of his nose, along his lips, his cheeks.

 _“I didn’t sleep a blink,”_ she whispered. Humor danced with the light in her eyes. In slow motion, her hands smoothed down his chest. “ _Some silly Sith was up all night-”_

“Oh? " he smirked, enjoying the way her mouth moved when she spoke. He wanted to be naked with her, to lie beneath the moon somewhere and make love to her until all the stars went out. " _What was he doing to you? T_ _ell me, and I’ll do it again. Right here. Right now."_

_I love you-_

She stroked back his hair from his face. _“He was talking in his sleep.”_

The way the humor went out in her eyes twisted his guts.

The smile slipped off his face. _“What did he say?”_

 _“You know,”_ she whispered sadly.

His heart clenched, he couldn’t draw a full breath. His lungs were too full of fear. _“Rey-”_

 _“See?”_ her voice was out of time with the movement of her lips. She was speaking into his ear from a thousand systems away, _“I told you you knew.”_

 _“Rey,”_ he swallowed, _“beloved, I am so sorry-”_

 _“Shhh,”_ she rose up and covered his lips with hers. _“You’re dreaming-”_

He jerked awake.

“My Lord? My Lord,” Captain Phasma was bent over him. Her gnarled hand was on his shoulder. “You’re dreaming. My Lord-”

“I’m fine.” He held up his hand, trying to shield out the harsh white of the cabin lights above him. His pupils strained against their searing glare. “Captain, I’m fine. Hand me my mask.”

He avoided her eye, scanning back and forth across his face as she handed it to him.

This new poly-plastic and durasteel apparatus was larger than its predecessor, its mechanics redesigned to support his transformation. Its mirrored visor was enhanced to filter out ultraviolet waves, the light’s most painful form to his changed eyesight. Liquid nitrogen inside its ventilation chambers cooled his airflow to his internal temperature, allowing him to breathe without burning his lungs with untempered air.

He welcomed its weight, bearing down on the dull ache inside his skull from all sides as its locking mechanism engaged with a vaporous hiss while his mind surfaced slowly. The details of his surroundings layered until the picture merged and came into focus. The sleek, stark captain’s quarters of his imperial lite-craft. The violent rattle of its sparse furnishing in the turbulence. The Captain looming above his command chair, pneumatic doors open to the dark, narrow galley behind her-

“We’re landing,” his voice sieved through the speech grate of his mask.

“Our sensors picked up a homing beacon matching the signature of the escape pod she took from the _Finalizer_.”

He sat up. “Where are we?”

“Tatooine, sir.”

 

 

A homely, awkward boy of seven, he sat with his legs crossed on the floor of the _Falcon_ , balancing a spanner wrench on the tip of one long finger. _“Hey, Dad?”_

From where he worked on the intestines of his ship, Han Solo’s deep, lazy gruff wafted up like cigar smoke into the hull. _“Yup?”_

_“Did you know my grandfather?”_

_“Who, Vader?”_

He caught the spanner in his palm and rolled his eyes. _“Obviously.”_

 _“Yeah, I met ‘im. Didn’t care for me too much, I can tell yah that. And believe me, the feeling was mutual.”_ His father’s large, tan hand, mottled with grease, appeared at the lip of the hole. _“Hand me that ratchet. No, the number eight. Yeah that’s the one-”_

On his hands and knees, he stared down at the top of his father’s crop of thick, sleek hair and asked reverently, _“What was he like?”_

Han fitted the ratchet around a lug as he answered, _“Tall, dark and scary. A real son of a bitch_ -” he looked up suddenly, pointing with the handle of the ratchet. _“Don’t say bitch in front of your mother._ _She’ll know who taught it to yah,”_ he father muttered under his breath as he began to crank.

He sat back on the floor with a thud, considering his father’s words as he set the spanner with a soft _clink_ on the durasteel between his boots. Concentrating, he closed his eyes and held out his hand. The spanner whipped off the floor and slapped into his palm. He grinned. _“I wanna be like him.”_

The _crick-crick_ of his father’s ratchet stopped. _“Ben-”_

He jumped.

Han was head and shoulders above the hole in the hull, staring at him with serious, green eyes. _“Don’t say that.”_

Irritated with his father, he sniffed, “Why?”

 _“Because he was a bad guy who was bantha-shit nuts, that’s why. He killed billions of people and terrorized the Galaxy. Ben-”_ Han pointed the ratchet. He sounded so mad. _“Don’t say you wanna be like him. Ever.”_ He snapped back over his shoulder as he ducked down into the hull, _“And don’t say shit, either.”_

Alone again, he hurled the spanner at captain’s chair in the cockpit and picked at the laces of his boots. His chest was tight. He didn’t know why his father’s words stung him, but they did.

 _“Hey,”_ Han’s voice was softer.

He didn’t look up from his laces.

His father reached out and ruffled his hair with a roguish half-smile. His thick fingers were calloused and warm. _“Hand your old man that screwdriver, would yah, partner?”_

Hiding behind his bangs, he handed his father the tool and asked quietly, _“Where was he from?”_

Han grunted, _“Only place in the Galaxy meaner n’he was. Tatooine-”_

 

 

His father's words stretched across time, racing on the winds that rushed between the high sand formations to reach him. _Nothin’ there but hopelessness and dust._

From where he’d hunkered down next to her empty escape pod, Kylo unfolded, his massive form climbing seemingly endlessly towards the bright blue sky. Harsh rays from the too-close sun refracted off the hard baked earth, bracketing him in heat. Beneath his black cowl, sweat trickled down his nape and between his shoulders as high above, a circling buzzard let out a sharp, rattling shriek.

It was three days since Rey left him.

His eyes scanned the horizon through the nightcast of his visor. For hundreds of miles in every direction, there was nothing but sand forms and dust.

_Why would she come here?_

He pressed the comm button near his ear. “Come in, Captain.”

“Captain Phasma, over,” her voice crackled in over the static.

“What’s the read-out on the microwave tracker?”

“Negative, sir. She’s not in this system.”

 _Our bride is not here,_ the Darkness sighed. _Failure. We waist precious time._

A dark flicker on the lip of the pod caught his attention.

A mammoth sand-colored spider the size of his hand dragged itself up and over into the pod. It flexed its venom-tipped fangs as its beaded eyes stared up at him. Thirty paces south, he noticed a long serpent with black lips and vermillion irises winding its way towards him through the dust. The vulture above him swooped lower and cawed.

The Darkness smiled. _Hello, children._

“- scouts haven’t detected her in any of the major systems,” the Captain was speaking. “Our search drones have reached the Outer Rim and are scanning. We will find her, Your Majesty. Over.”

Wind began to whip up off the hardscape, throwing dust. He looked back out at the horizon due east, where a storm was beginning to gather. “Copy. I’m going to check out the bunker to see if she left anything behind.”

The swelling static distorted the Captain’s wry snort. “What, like your light saber, over?”

His sword was only thing Rey had taken from the _Finalizer_. Well that, and the half-billion credits in precious jewels she was wearing. And his only heir.

Oh, and his entire fucking heart.

Dripping sweat stung his eyes behind his visor. He blinked, relieved his breathing apparatus cooled the air. It would have scorched his lungs.

“You Malefi- -ence,” interference from the static broke apart her voice, “-orm is co- -ing in from the east, over.”

He watched a bolt of white light strike the ground at the point where black clouds swallowed the blue sky. “I see it.”

“Barometric pressure re -outs indi- -ate it will -over- us in sev- -inutes, over.”

“Copy. Rendezvous in seven. Over and out.” He killed the comm switch and started towards the abandoned Resistance bunker. Another blast of hot wind raked sand across his visor and lifted his cowl, streaming it out behind him like a dark banner.

The buzzard above screamed one last time before beating its wings westward for shelter.

Inside the bunker was cooler, stale and pitch-dark. He disengaged the latch on his mask and removed it, relieved to finally wipe the burn out of his eyes with the back of his glove. He felt the grit from the surface, thick and glassine, on his skin and behind his tongue. The bunker had only one large room, it was exactly the way he remembered, bare apart from a long, malfunctioned terminal that served as a table in its center, surrounded by empty ammunitions crates and fuel barrels, anything that could be used as a makeshift chair.

A plume of dust rose like smoke as he dropped his mask with a heavy, hollow _clunk_ on the terminal. He stood at the far end, opposite where he’d sat that night the General and his mother negotiated the terms of his marriage, in the same spot his bride had been.

Longing sank like a stone into the pit of his gut as he closed his eyes and tried to recall every detail of her – her warm, shaking breath, how she felt inside his arms as he showed her how to write her name on his tablet. On its own, his gloved finger traced slowly through the silt on the table. _Rey of Jakku_.

“I've always liked your name. Kylo. It sounds so much nicer than Ben. Much more imperial,” she snorted softly.

He opened his eyes.

She was standing at the other end of the table, her chin tipped down at its surface. “It looks pretty when it’s written, too. _L_ ’s are always beautiful. _Q_ ’s are ugly. They look like _two_ ’s that got drunk.”

“Rey.”

“Did you know I taught myself to write your name first?” she looked up at him. Her eyes were large and cat-like in the dark. “Don’t ask me why. I wanted to, I guess.”

He swallowed, listening for the telltale ring of silence that was a Force connection. But all he could hear was the blood rushing through his ears and the staccato thunder of his heart. “Is this-” his lashes flickered. He was afraid to blink. “Are you here?”

She opened her mouth and shut it. A tear dripped down her cheek, like water falling down a pane of glass. She cut it off with a swat of her hand.

“I’m nowhere, thanks to you,” she spat. “Because of what you did.”

He started around the table. “Tell me where you are and I’ll come get you-”

She shied back. “I know what I have to do-" 

“Rey, the Galaxy isn’t safe, you need to tell me where you are so I can protect you-”

She shook her head, "But I don’t want to do it. Kylo-”

He reached for her, but she was gone.

He stopped and stared down at the spot where she’d stood. Grief, sharp-tipped and raw, choked him. The Darkness sluiced beneath his skin, its sinister breath hissing in his ears.

_Sanity slipping through his fingers cracks in the moonlit path along the garden fleeting she will die alone-_

“Shut up!” he snarled, digging his fingers into their cruel smirks playing behind his eyes.

Outside, at the surface, the wind screamed past the mouth of the bunker. The voices snickered. _Tick tock, tick tock, the Captain is waiting for Us_.

Furious, he whirled, cowl following, ready to retrieve his mask and get away from this haunted place. But something on the surface of the terminal made him look twice.

His name, in slow, painstaking letters, written in the dust. _Kylo Ren._

Breath shaking, he followed the shape with his finger, widening its track.

The Dark smiled, a sharp, gleaming mouthful of interlocking teeth. _How sweet. She loves Us._

Back outside the bunker, dry, scorching gales ripped over the hardscape, wrenching his cowl and the tails of his surcoat. They flapped furiously in the roaring currents as he shielded his unmasked face from the worst of the sand and waded through the winds to his lite-craft. The engines kicked on, their whirring turbines gathering momentum as he approached the ship’s lowering onramp.

Captain Phasma was waiting for him at the top its mouth.

“I have good news, sir,” she shouted.

The wind tore his booming voice west as he pounded up the ramp, “You found her?”

“No,” she shook her head. Her words became clearer as it lifted behind him, sealing off the storm. “But we found your mother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I gotta say this - I have the coolest readers in Archive. I mean that. Your feedback, encouragement, kindness, and HUMOR - oh my God you guys are HILARIOUS - fill my heart's cup and make my year. I adore you, deeply.
> 
> If you are still hanging on to this story by your fingernails - baby, do not fear. I know it's not your usual, "Kylo has an epiphany and changes deeply as a person, now they balance each other out even though that is NOT how the fucking Dark Side WORKS YOU IGNORANT TRASH" fic (ahem, sorry, excuse me one second while I throw up in my mouth) But this story does end in love. I promise you. :)
> 
> Love you much,  
> P.


	30. Don't You Ever Say, I Just Walked Away. I Will Always Want You. I Can't Live A Lie, Running For My Life. I Will Always Want You.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sanity: Oh. Dear. GOD.  
> Pastel: *snaps gum and grins* "I think it's awesome."  
> Sanity: … … … *walking away in disgust*

It took three days for his lite-craft to reach Base One.

Three days of the Darkness winding through his organs and speaking black prophesy into his heart.

_Our dear one is unguarded. Even now Our enemies search for her. When they find her, they will tear her open and rip out Our heir. They will beat and choke and kill her. They will violate her. We are failure. Worthless intolerable weak-hearted failure-_

_Doomed_ , It whispered into that liquid sliver of space between brain and skull, whenever he closed his eyes, desperate to sleep. _We are doomed without her…_

Seven days without rest.

His eyes ached. Head pounding, he stared out through the heavily tinted window in his captain’s quarters at the white, frozen world he’d made their home. _Hux better have results._

 

The General met them on the landing deck.

He stood in his customary stance, chin high in the air and hands behind his back, feet spaced the width of his shoulders apart. His red hair thrashed in the churning sweep of the thrusters as the lite-craft hovered into the hanger and aligned to its dock. His uniform was pressed and precise, but his pallor was the worst Ren had seen in over twenty years of knowing him.

In the week since Rey had escaped the _Finalizer_ and destroyed over half their roving fleet, the General had aged ten years.

Ren waited for the Captain to deplane first and followed her, his monsterous footsteps juddering the durasteel ramp.

The General submitted a sharp salute, which the Captain returned in kind, and Ren acknowledged with a nod. “General.”

“The prisoners are detained within the main ward,” he shouted to be heard the over the engines of two Fighters gearing up for flight in the next bay next.

In addition to the search drones scouting for her in the major systems and all around the Outer Rim, the first and second TIE fleet rotated through around-the-clock patrols that spanned as far as the dead space beyond the Rim.

The General and the Captain fell in behind him as he started across the hanger for the lift that would take him up to the bridge. The three of them moved in tight V-formation, as all around them, showers of white-hot sparks fountained from soldering irons and air-guns pumped rivets into soffits. His new flagship, the _Conqueror_ , was still under construction, with all progress on his armada under halt until it was completed.

Four hundred clicks east from Base One, his intergalactic warships sat abandoned in a mega-hanger while crews of engineers and construction droids rushed to replace the flagship his wife had destroyed.

“I have to inform you, Your Majesty-” the General’s crisp accent wavered forcefully over the boom and clash of construction, “Lady Organa is in medical stasis.”

“Stasis?” Ren glanced up beyond the bridge, at the titanic air shaft that spanned over one thousand floors above the main hanger. Somewhere, on one of those floors, was his mother.

He could not sense her Light.

Behind him, the General nodded. His shoulders sagged, as if he was fighting the perpetual urge to fold in on himself, but he kept his pace brisk as he explained, “Her condition is stable, but her medical reports indicate she recently suffered a very mild stroke. I ordered her to be placed under cryo-sleep until you returned.”

Something slick and crawling slipped through Ren’s gut as he pictured his mother hooked up through tubes to monitors and breathing tanks beneath a diamond-glass dome.

Where it lurked beneath his skin, the Darkness smirked, pleased for the first time in days. _How the mighty have fallen._

“What about the dog?” he heard the Captain ask on his right as the three of them boarded the service life.

“Captured with Lady Organa,” the General looked relieved to share this bit of good news after the doors closed, blocking out the clang of construction. “We’ve prepped him for questioning, in anticipation of your arrival.”

“FN-2187,” Ren’s dark murmur cut over the mechanical pulley’s crude hum. From his incredible height, he stared down the General. “Was he with them?”

General Hux hesitated. He glanced at the Captain.

She shifted minutely, sensing the growing storm.

The General’s gaze landed somewhere around Ren’s shoulder as he hedged, “The deserter was not recovered. Our rangers are following reports of a sighting beyond the Dead Space-”

 _She’s with him now,_ the many jeering murmurs clambered out of time with one another, _He has her._

The General flinched back, cut off abruptly when Ren raised his fist, roaring, and rammed into the back of the lift. The six-inch thick panel of durasteel groaned as it crumpled in around his arm like cheap aluminum.

He reared back to strike again.

“My Lord-” the Captain began calmly.

But inside him, they were cawing, _Poor little Sith has lost his bitch and doesn’t know where to find her. Leave her alone and she’ll come home, dragging her lover behind her-_

“You told me to _wait_ ,” he snarled, twisting away from the overhead light as he scratched at their mocking sneers behind his eyes.

“Master Ren,” Captain Phasma’s hands were on his forearms, her sharp hiss slipping between the voices like a knife, “take control of your emotions!”

“Phasma,” he moaned, anguish twisting his guts. His knees buckled, he tilted violently and stumbled, crashing back into the wall behind him.

The lift lurched sideways, grinding against the bridge as it docked.

His hands shook. He shielded his eyes and groaned. “My mask-”

“It’s alright, sir, I have it here,” Phasma hunkered down in the chasm between his knees, her wide, triumphant shoulders blocking out to the worst of the glare above as she fitted the apparatus over his head, “I’ll have Main switch the protocol over to emergency lighting. No need for all that insipid glare in the corridors, is there?”

He tried to focus in on her voice as the locking mechanism engaged, but the first breath of cool air swamped his lungs, soothing the burn as, through the lens of his visor, the world went blissfully dark.

“Well? Don’t stand there gaping like a fucking burra fish, Hux-” she snapped, “pull Organa out of stasis, immediately.”

“But Captain,” the General sputtered, “it will be days before she is fully awake and prepared for questioning-”

“Then start the process!” she snarled. “We need to find that girl, _now_!”

Ren leaned his head back against the lift and snorted. _Some Empire we make._

“I warned you, all of you,” the General was growling as he pivoted on his boot heel and strode long and graceful out of the lift. “Fucking insufferable!” he tossed back.

The single, malevolent Voice within him gnashed its great jaws and snarled. _Where is Our beloved?_

“I’ll find her,” he gasped between long, cold breaths. “I’ll find her.”

“Sir,” the Captain was looming over him again. Her eye was determined. “You need to get up. Now is not the time to lose ourselves to hysteria.”

“It’s been a week, Phasma-”

“I know.”

He looked at his hands, trembling inside his gloves, and willed them to stop. It was a full moment before they did. “It’s been a week. The Darkness… my power…” he shrugged his shoulders, fighting the insane urge to laugh, “I can’t control it without her.”

She sighed. “I know.”

An image of his wife in the arms of her lover struck him behind the eyes. His wry mirth went out like a candle, his chest electric and hot with hate. “She’s with him. She has to be. That’s how she got off Tatooine. He was waiting for her-”

“If she is,” Phasma began darkly. Her eye met his through his mask, “we will find them. And then you will have her, and you and I will lay him out like a lamb and cut him open. We’ll eat out his heart, and I’ll mount his head as a trophy for you myself.”

He shut his eyes, letting her malice wash over him in frozen waves. 

“Thank you, Captain." His smile wrenched the ruined half of his face. "You always know what to say.”

“You’re welcome.” She straightened. “Now get up.”

 

 

The red, hellish glare of emergency lighting guided their way through the halls.

General Hux stepped outside of the interrogation room to meet them. The flashing lights burnished his pale skin copper. He affected composure as he enunciated at them through his teeth, “Can we please, for the love of God, aspire to some degree of self-control in front of this Rebel scoundrel? The last thing our administration needs is for its would-be insurgents to witness their Supreme Leader in psychopathic freefall-”

Ren glanced down at the Captain. The two shared a deviant look through their masks.

“So what you’re saying is,” his cool smirk sieved through his speech grate as they parted around the General, “give him a show.”

“That is precisely the opposite of what- Your Majesty is sailing perilously close to the edge of madness from whence- Captain, say _something_ -”

They left his frustrated howling behind them as stepped over the threshold and closed the pneumatic doors behind them.

Ren was not prepared for the surge of hatred he felt when he saw his mother’s mongrel sagging from a durasteel board in the middle of the small room. It roared over him, seismic waves of animus crashing through his aura, drowning him in a single instinct.

_Crush the interloper._

“Where is my wife?” his mask transformed his snarl into bestial, mechanical growl.

Slowly, the mongrel raised his chin.

Blood dripped from the corner of his mouth. Inside its restraint, his cybernetic arm was crumpled and malformed. One of his eyes was swollen shut, the other grew wider and wider with horrified disbelief as his neck craned back to take in Ren’s terrifying new form.

“Ho-ly shit…” he breathed.

The Darkness preened. _We are Power._

He recovered with a sneer, lisping through his split lip, “Well Goddamn, if it isn’t Darth Dickless and his sidekick, Captain Cyclopes. How ya been, honey?”

The Captain regarded him coolly, “Mister Dameron.”

“I was talkin’ to the biggun,” he leaned his head back and let his good eye drift shut. “And it’s _Commander_ , cunt.”

She snorted. “Of whose army?”

“I’ll ask you again,” Ren menaced closer. His footsteps boomed within the small room, rattling its walls. “Where is my wife?”

The mongrel’s grin widened. He wagged his eyebrows. “You mean the skinny guy, red hair, purdy mouth? You just missed him-”

A dull _thud_ , like metal striking soft flesh, rang through the room as Ren’s uppercut connected with his solar plexus, slamming him back into board and making it shudder with the force of the impact.

The mongrel’s smug mirth fell off his face, his mouth gaped, eyes bulging. For a moment, the room was completely silent. Then he retched, a sick, rasping sound, spewing blood and bile onto his chest and the floor beneath his dangling feet.

The Dark smiled, mollified by the violence, as Ren flexed and examined his gloved hand. He’d struck the mongrel with a tenth of his full strength, if that, and the dog was still gasping where he hung from his restraints.

 _Invincible,_ the voices whispered.

“Not without her,” he murmured back, as their claw-tipped fingers continued to dig behind his eyes.

The mongrel coughed and spat. “Your… people skills are… really improving…”

Ren’s hand shot out, he caught the dog by its flapping maw and clenched. “Tell me where she is,” his threat rumbled liquid and dangerous through his mask, “or I’ll reach down your throat and rip out your spine.” He wrung the mongrel’s jaw until the bones popped warningly, “and I’ll make my mother watch.”

The mongrel began to tremble.

Ren released him with a shove, so that his head whipped back and struck the board. “Speak.”

He continued to shake, bobbing and bouncing as he laughed so hard the board rattled.

“You think this is funny?” Murder swept through Ren’s aura. He stepped closer, so that his massive form eclipsed the red glower signaling from the wall behind him, casting the commander in darkness. “You think I can’t hurt you in ways that are _unimaginably_ painful? That I can’t make you beg for mercy? That my mother’s weak heart can survive watching her beloved mutt weep for death?”

The mongrel closed his eye, head lolling as he cooed and hawed. “Oh, brother- you are _wrecked_.”

Ren cocked his mask. “What did you say?”

The dog smiled. His shoulders still juddered with sporadic chuckles. “I called it, as soon as we sat down in that bullshit meeting, to talk about her tour. The way you looked at her, the look on your fuck-ugly face… _whoopish_ , _whoopish_.” He shook his head. “Man I wish I had a holo of that-”

“This is pointless,” the Captain had wedged her arm between them and was pushing Ren’s chest to back him away. “He’s delirious-”

“That’s right, cunt. Take him outta here before he hears the truth.”

Ren’s eye twitched. He ground his teeth. Beneath his skin, the Darkness tensed and coiled. “The truth?”

Captain Phasma tried prying him bodily away. “Ignore him, sir, he’s incoherent and hallucinating. The General’s men have over-primed him. We’ll start again tomorrow-”

Above her shoulder, the mongrel met his eyes through his visor.

“I know what you're afraid of,” his sneer was back, a cruel glint to its razor-edge, “I don’t need the fucking Force to figure it out-”

“Enough!” the Captain barked.

Ren slid her aside as if she were made of parchment. He loomed over the mongrel as his aura rose up around them, black and crackling with so much malice it was visible to the naked eye.

“Tell me, dog- what am I afraid of?”

“Your Majesty, no-”

He threw out his hand. Phasma jerked back and slammed into the wall behind him.

The mongrel’s loathing, gloating smile only widened.

Ren raised his palm, fingers curling as his power reached past the mongrel’s pale defenses into his mind. He didn’t have to look far, the thought was waiting for him on the surface, as bright as the light of a new star.

_No matter what you do, or how powerful you become, she will never give a shit about you._

He wrenched back as if he’d been seared. The Dark hissed and reared up, baring its fangs.

“Liar!” they snarled together with the same venom-tipped voice. Ren’s hand shot out, this time he caught the mongrel by his throat and throttled. “She loves Us!”

“Master Ren, stop! The girl will never come back if you destroy him-”

Beneath his glove, the mongrel's eye drifted shut. Peace washed over his features.

“Oh yeah?” he snorted, “She loves you so much, why’d she leave your ass and blow up your ship?”

 _Crush,_ the Dark growled through its foaming maw, _crush the lying, scheming Light-_

Roaring, Ren raised his fist.

_Kylo._

Her whisper struck the black surface of his mind and rippled outward through his aura.

Instantly, the Dark’s gnashing jaws grew still. _It is her-_

“Shut up!” he snapped. His fist still wavered above the mongrel face. He closed his eyes.

Together, they strained to hear her.

_Kylo. Kylo Ren._

His fist trembled, glove creaking.

“I’m here,” he angled his mask, listening for her voice over the ferocious war beat of his heart. Sweat beaded above his mouth, he rolled his lips to wick it away. “Where are you?”

Her face, her beautiful, beautiful face, materialized inside his mind. He could see her head and shoulders, her eyes were closed, brows pinched together in concentration. She was frowning.

Behind his ribs, his Darkness scratched and whined.

“Rey-”

 _Come here,_ her lips moved as she spoke.

His fist fell, cowl whirling as he twisted and turned in feral half-circles while his aura rushed away from him, seeking her Light. “Tell me where you are.”

She snorted, the end of her long ponytail slipping over her shoulder onto her breast. She opened her eyes.

 _You’re so_ magnificent _, figure it out yourself._

“He talks to himself now?” the mongrel was rasping at the Captain from his binds. He hocked and spat. “Well _that’s_ comforting.”

“My Lord, can you hear her?” the Captain had picked herself up off the floor and was edging towards him, “Is she nearby?”

His Darkness swelled faster, a black avalanche of power racing over the surface of the planet, swallowing the vast sprawl of Base One and the wintery forest beyond as preternatural night eclipsed the sky.

Within him, the voices cackled and cawed.

 _Silence!_ roared the Great Dark. Their clamor died.

 _There,_ his power spoke. _She is there._

His eyes opened. He was already at the door, pounding fast through the corridor, the Captain’s shouts behind him muted as he zeroed in on her location through the Force. In his mind’s eye, her Light was like a beacon, gold sunlight through cerulean waters, the blue heart of his Darkness.

General Hux appeared at the end of the hall just as Ren’s long, fast stride broke into a loping sprint. The General hurled himself backwards to avoid collision as Ren barreled past him, the Captain cantering to catch up.

“Sir!” The General’s soles shrieked on the slick tile as he started after them. “Microwave scanners have detected Her Majesty’s particle signature-”

“She’s here,” Ren shot back over his shoulder, gulping fast mouthfuls of frigid air as he thundered past another set of hallways. The corridor dead-ended into a main landing, with a crescent bay of guarded elevators to his left, and a railed overlook to his right. He skidded to a stop between them.

“She’s in this system,” Hux corrected, winded slightly. “She cannot be on this planet, her entry would have to pass through the detection field-”

“She’s here,” Ren repeated. He pounded to the overlook and stared down the great shaft at the landing dock nine hundred floors below them. His hands wrung the railing. “I can feel her. She’s definitely here.”

The Dark curled into a smile. _We do not keep her waiting._

He nodded, and leapt.

Behind him, Phasma screamed.

The floors rushed past him, faster and faster, until they bled together in a blur of dark steel punctuated by blinding flashes of sparks. His blood thundered, his heart fell through him.

Fifty, one hundred, two hundred floors.

The cold updraft from the open hanger roared over him, dragging his cowl upwards behind him as he drew still more momentum. Beneath his skin, the Darkness slithered.

Four hundred, five hundred, six hundred floors.

Air whistled over the curve of his mask, making it judder where plexi-plastic joined durasteel. His lungs thrashed, his hands curled into fists strained open against the violent updraft.

Seven hundred, eight hundred.

_Darkness-_

Like a serpent’s great forked tongue, his power rose up from its mouth to meet him.

Nine hundred.

His feet hit the deck with the force and speed of an incoming lite-craft. The impact collapsed the durasteel under him and blasted outward, rocking the entire fledgling flagship with a seismic aftershock of kinetic energy. Darkshear lashed the air all around him, cold blue strikes of lightning fissuring outwards like sinister skeleton fingers. His bones rang out, power vibrating within his very cells as his thick, muscular thighs made the climb out of the crater. All around him, troopers and engineers scattered like insects under a flame when he reached the top.

_She is very close._

“I feel her,” he murmured, fist beating back the savage attack of his heart against his ribs as he pounded fast towards an idling TIE Fighter.

Its pilot scrambled and wrenched at his flight straps, desperate to unfasten himself before the inevitable collision. He was too late, as Ren reached bodily into the Fighter and grasped both seat and pilot in his massive grip. With a furious roar, he tore them from the ship and flung them aside. Then he folded himself into the black, gaping maw of the hull and drew down its hatch, tapping quickly on the control pad set into the wall on his right.

“ _Good evening, Kylo Ren_ ,” a cool female voice greeted him. “ _My equipment scanners indicate a major malfunction in your seat’s safety harness_ -”

“Override,” his command sieved deep and distorted through his speech grate. “Prepare launching sequence. Coming out at land speed.”

The hull rattled around him as the Fighter’s thrusters ignited.

_“Launching at land speed in two, three, one-”_

He gripped the independent gear sticks on either side as the Fighter punched smoothly out of the hanger at four times the speed of his lite-craft. In a matter of microseconds, he was roaring high above his flagship into the black, churning skies above Base One.

“Omega, override autopilot function. Engage manual steering.”

Over the turbulence juddering the ship, the flight program warned, _“Disengaging autopilot. Kylo Ren has full control.”_

He pressed the left gear forward and the Fighter soared east, towards the pinpoint of her Light on the horizon. The scream of the ship was loud inside his mask, as was the chant of the Siths inside him.

_Run, run, as fast as you can!_

“Supreme Leader, come in, sir. This is General Hux. Over,” the General’s voice wavered in over the comm set in his mask.

Her Light began to take shape, a brilliant pale-blue flash under the canopy of his Darkness, as his ship ate up the ground between them. “Come in, Hux.”

“Sir, a Rebel ship is attacking the Armada fleet. Ground forces are reporting heavy fire-”

_Ah, she is after Our fleet. How interesting…_

“Of course she is,” Ren muttered. His anger flared, he ground his teeth behind his mask. “Of course. Spoiled fucking-” he slammed his fist into the hull, “I’m going to kill her!”

Hux crackled in over static. “I’m receiving communique now that Bays One and Two are destroyed. A defense strike is on its way-”

His heart thrashed, he rammed down the gear stick as far as he could without it snapping as his other hand typed out the sequence to activate his launching boosters. “My wife is on that ship, do not engage!”

The Fighter rocketed forward at twice the speed, rending the landscape as it barreled beyond the speed of sound. His grip choked the controls. “I repeat, do not engage! Get the ground fleet out of there, _now_!”

Directly ahead, the titanic hanger for his Armada fleet was on fire. Smoke poured from a massive rip in the overhang, flames leaping out in every direction. His ship jolted suddenly, jerked momentarily off-course by the blast wave of a bomb detonating. Through his visor, he saw another section of overhang crack and fall inward on his burning fleet.

Out of the new column of black smoke rising like a cyclone from the blast site, a ship tore free, trailing cinder and exhaust as it barreled vertically towards the furious sky.

The _Millennium Falcon_.

“You unbelievable bitch,” he wrenched the controls back, roaring upwards through the thick gloom. “Are you fucking kidding me, Rey?”

Her derisive snort struck his conscience like a lit match on a pool of gasoline. _Does it look like I’m joking?_

The voices behind his eyes whooped and hollered, leaping in hedonistic revel, as the Dark dragged its razor teeth in a long, clicking chuckle. _There she is. Our dearly beloved._

In-between the dark layers of whirring, bruise-colored clouds, their ships leveled off to face one another.

He swallowed back his fury, rubbing his lips together before he pressed the indicator on his comm, “It’s her. She’s in the _Falcon_. Over.”

“Sir, the damage to the fleet is tremendous,” the General’s taut warbled stretched over the airwaves. “Out of seventy-two craft, there are only twelve remaining. Over.”

Turbulence rattled his view-shield as a bolt of lightning as wide as his Fighter cracked through the space between their ships. “Goddamnit Rey, you’ve made your point-”

_No, I haven’t._

He gritted his teeth. “Get your ass on the ground, _now_.”

Behind her view-shield, both her hands made a crude gesture.

“Rey,” his growl rumbled through their bond, “I am _warning_ you-”

A rapid scatter of green laser-fire ripped screaming through the murk below them and struck the _Falcon_ starboard, jolting the ship sideways. Its impact followed the curve of her ship’s protective shield, illuminating her face through the view-shield in brilliant bands fast-moving acid light. Her mouth was set firmly, but her eyes were wide with terror.

“ _Hold your fire!”_ his roar rent the airwaves of comms, followed by a rending shriek of feedback as he bared hard on the controls, barreling in the direction of the laser blast. “Omega, engage combat mode-”

_“Combat mode engaged.”_

“General!” a green-scale grid pattern overlaid his view-shield as he boomed through his comms, “One more hit on that ship and I will kill _every one of your children_!”

Over the whip-crack of radio static, he heard the General give the frantic order, “Stand down! I repeat: stand down! Sir, the fleet is not responding-”

His sensors picked up three other TIE Fighters lurking through the cloud-cover, as well as twelve AT-AT units on the ground.

"Darkness-"

Above him, his Darkshear gathered, sizzling and snaring the air.

_We are here, Son._

He closed in on a Fighter forty meters ahead of him.

_“Warning: friendly target. Disengage.”_

“Override.” He aimed his site at the Fighter’s weakest point, the join between wing and body and fired.

His blast connected at the same moment his Darkshear tore down from the sky and struck his ground fleet.

The Fighter lurched sideways and spun out, screaming as it spiraled with the combined momentum of its flight and the impact towards his burning Armada. It slammed the overhang in a brilliant explosion of shrapnel and white light.

_“Direct hit. Target destroyed.”_

He wrenched his controls to roar back up through the dark, whirling cloud ceiling above him.

"Darkness-"

_North._

He veered right, searching his grid view for Fighters, and found them dead ahead.

"There. Do you see them?"

_Oh yes. We do._

The Fighters were circling the _Falcon_ , staying above-range of its canon as they used their speed to create a wind tunnel, using air pressure to force her ship towards ground. Even from this distance, he could see the _Falcon_ rattling, its joins too ancient to withstand the violent press on all sides.

Heart hammering inside his throat, he lined up his site and waited for his window, while beyond him, his Darkshear gathered. If his timing as off even by a fraction of a second-

"Tell me..."

_Now._

They struck as one, his laser blast finding one Fighter as it curved around her while his Darkness lashed lightning on the other from above. The _Falcon_ tore free of the wind tunnel as both Fighters streaked shrieking from the sky.

_“Direct hit. All targets neutralized.”_

He sagged, boneless with relief, and blew out a breath. His eyes pricked behind his visor. “Thank you… thank you…”

Through their bond, he could see her clearly. She was drenched in sweat, her shoulders heaving, face drawn and pale-white, clenching onto her controls for dear life.

_Kylo?_

“I’m here, baby,” he reached up with juddering fingers and unlatched the locking mechanism for his mask, “I’m right here.”

Her breath hitched as his face came through the bond.

In that dimension beyond perception, he felt his Darkness unfurl like a great black dragon with vermillion teeth and violent eyes, and gather her Light in its arms. With gentle, whispering touch, her Light stroked its scales and sighed softly into its maw.

For the first time in days, the clawing, roiling clamor of voices within him drew back like the tide. He laid back against the cool durasteel and he closed his eyes.

_We are home._

Scenes fell past him down into the smoke and cinder below. His own face, smirking down at hers. Her hand in the fold of his arm. His morbid chuckle. His deep, mournful stare. Her cheek pressed against his coldness as they danced in their dark apartment. The black, arrhythmic beat of his heart. His pale, corded arms and muscular shoulders flexing as he moved over her, making love to her in their bed.

They weren’t his memories, he realized. They were hers.

He sat up, “Rey-”

Out of his periphery, he caught the flare of the _Falcon_ ’s thrusters igniting. It was a flash he knew like the back of his hand.

She was revving to light speed.

High above the planet, from kilometers away, he looked deep into her eyes. “Don’t do this, Rey. Don’t go this way.”

Her face cracked. She covered her grief with her hands.

“Stay with me.” His lip trembled. He swallowed, concentrating harder than he ever had in his life as he willed her with every cell in his body, “Stay.”

She faded from his mind like the last lingering light at sundown dissolving into darkness as his father’s ship licked silver out of the bruised, seething sky.

Thunder boomed out, vibrating through his ship as lightning split the skies. The Dark threw back its head back and bayed.

Behind their talons, the voices snickered as they crept, _Poor, poor Light-monger, look how sad he is…_

“Your Majesty, come in.” By his feet on the floor of the hull, the General’s voice was warbling through his mask, “Our ground fleet is destroyed, there are no survivors. The micro scanners aren’t picking up her signal. We’ve lost her. Over.”

Sleet began falling in fast-moving sheets from the anguished sky. He ground his teeth, watching it roll down curve of his view-shield, as wet salt dripped off his jaw into the folds of his cowl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok ok ok - so - you guys are *amazing* and I love you. Your comments lit a fire under my ass, and this is the result. Glorious blazing soap opera trash-fire. 
> 
> Huge thank you to InspirationalMisquotes for being the Thelma to my Louise. As she so aptly observed when beta-ing this, "This is the Supreme version of keying your husband's sports car."
> 
> Oh Kylo. You wanted Rey to love you? Well baby, you better buckle the fuck up. 
> 
> Those Jakkuvian bitches are crazy.
> 
> Lemme know whatcha thought :>


	31. You Took Your Coat Off, And Stood In The Rain. You're Always Crazy Like That.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2 weeks after she destroys his Armada. 22 days since she blew up the Finalizer.

She was unbearably hot.

At some point in the early morning, the sun slanted its rays beneath the wing of her commandeered search-craft. It heated her bare leg and the black hilt of her husband’s saber on the bed pile beside her, and painted her closed eyelids an urgent orange-bright.

She groaned, kicking back blankets as she wriggled deeper into the shadow of her ship and hid her face in the bend of her arm. She was determined to rest, despite the blazing heat and the loud calls of the colorful birds from the treeline. It was impossible to sleep without his big, cool body next to hers, but she could still keep her eyes closed and pretend.

Something within her belly flickered. Just a tiny pitter-patter of movement, small and feathery and sweetly dark.

She cupped the swell of her tummy and rolled onto her side. Her legs drew up, she tucked her chin between her knees and closed her eyes. Except for her soft, silt-colored boots and his ring, she was completely naked.

“Hello, lovie.”

The little black flame inside her flipped and rolled. She hoped it could hear her, and that it was happy to know her. She certainly loved it, with all her heart.

She concentrated on that feeling, the tingling outward press of Light on all sides of her chest, as she spoke to it in a breathy whisper, “Did you sleep alright? I hope you did. You’re so beautiful, I’ve loved you all my life. Even when I was small as you. Can you imagine it? Me, being a baby?” She smiled into the dry skin of her knees. “Ludicrous.”

A yawn overtook their conversation and she arched into it, letting the air touch the soft, sweat-slick underside of her breasts as her arms stretched high above her head. She dropped back onto the blankets with a gentle _thud_. Accidentally, her fingertips brushed the smooth shape of his saber.

The metal was hot, but inside its kyber burned cold.

Maybe today would be better. Maybe she’d miss him only every other minute.

“Are you hungry?” she asked loudly, refusing to rub the ache in her breast. “Should I make us some breakfast?”

She took the continuous, feather-like flutter to be, _Yes._

 

 

 

“Force almighty,” she puffed, plucking her wrappings around her chest to let some of the heat escape as she looked around. “It’s like a bajillion fucking degrees on this planet. I feel like we’re standing on the sun.”

This world was absurdly hot, hotter even than Jakku, despite being almost completely covered by water. Its surface was sparsely dappled by islands of thick, lush jungle teeming with life. She’d been there five days, and by every mid-morning, without doing _anything_ , she had sweat pooled between her breasts, in the creases of her thighs, behind her knees and in the crack of her ass.

She inhaled deeply, feeling like she was drinking more air than she was breathing as she waded through the undergrowth. When she reached a small clearing, she braced her hands on her lower back and tipped up her chin, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sun’s position in the sky through the dense canopy above.

It was barely midday, by the looks of it. The worst of the wet heat had yet to come.

She thought about the cool darkness of her apartment on the _Finalizer_ , curled up on the smooth leather sectional beside her colder, darker husband. With his arm around her, long and solid and impossibly strong, her cheek on his shoulder, the tip of her nose pressed against his icy neck. It was a real luxury for a sand rat, even more than her dresses and jewels. His aching, exulting coldness.

Her eyes pricked. She sniffed harshly and spat out her self-pity onto the ground, forcibly crushing the broad, fallen leaves beneath her boots as she stomped westward towards the falls. Her husband’s light saber rattled where it hung from a thin sash around her hips as she chided, “Honestly Rey, don’t be such a baby. Oh, not that there’s something wrong with being a baby,” she laid a hand on her belly as she amended quickly, “It’s just that- we can never go back to him. Why? I’ll tell you, he’s mean and a total lunatic and he… he’s…”

She couldn't bring herself to say _hideous_ , not after his transformation.

Ben Solo had always been ugly to her, she pitied him his big, crooked beak and bone-colored skin and hair as dark as motor grease. It had truly shocked her when, almost two years ago, he stood up in her interrogation room and took of his mask. She hadn’t known what to make of this creature, obviously human yet completely alien to her. He was unlike anyone or anything she’d seen on Jakku, where the harsh sun baked hides golden brown and bleached hair light. It had repulsed her to touch him, and when he touched her. Those black eyes and malformed features looming over her, watching her as he took off her dress and kissed her breasts and gently pried apart her thighs to make love to her.

A price for her failures that was almost too much to bear.

But she was used to him now, his bold, dark stare every time she glanced at him, his crooked smiles and affectionate sneers that twisted his scar. Even his skin, pale as nightworms, whiter than winter against all the perfect black he wore, stopped scaring her after a while. She supposed Siths were all meant to be ugly, that the Force made them frightening and gut-wrenching to look at so that the Galaxy would know, _I am Death._

Or something equally dramatic.

But that all changed the night he rose from the bacta tank and took on the Darkness.

Her footsteps softened as she pictured him naked and towering above her, his skin then dark and brindled, body still slick from the healing waters, his Darkshear lashing dangerously all around him. He looked unimaginably powerful, indestructible.

So, so beautiful.

She stopped walking and closed her eyes, letting the sounds of the forest fade away as she relived in slow motion the moment he stooped to lift her. The span of his massive hands overlapping around her little waist as he held her above him and kissed her. Her belly flipped and fluttered.

She lurched forcefully into another march.

She was starving, obviously. She’d only had four portions of ration for breakfast, and that was fifteen minutes ago. She was starving and weak from this delirious heat.

It was all _his_ fault. He was the reason she had to traipse through the jungle in a wispy handmade leotard, pining over her him like some stupid lovesick porgelette.

“Fuck this planet,” she hiss-whispered. She slowed her stomp so that her footfalls were less audible as she neared one of the food traps she’d hidden in the dense, mottled compost on the forest floor. “Fuck that dumb Sith _and_ his Darkness… murderous snake… leaving me out here to die… doesn’t give a shit about me or his baby…”

She crept quietly through the young growth and crouched to lift the matt of leaves and tarp she’d laid over the mouth of her trap.

Nothing.

She wasn’t sure how _yet_ , but that was definitely his fault, too.

Huffing, she reached her hand inside the trap and pinched out the bait, a quarter-portion, careful not to bump its spring mechanism. Then she stood and kicked it away, listening to its jaws clap around nothing, and flopped down in the leaves where it had laid, her husband’s sword clinking at her side.

At this rate, she’d be out of food in a week.

She popped the bait into her mouth and chewed miserably. Her Light, unbothered by principles like dignity or pride, moped hopeless around her as within her womb, his small, sweet darkness paddled and spun.

“Crybabies,” she sulked, swatting damp flyaways off of her face. “We’re not going back to him, _ever_ , so just… chin up, alright? I can take care of us.”

She tucked in her heels and hugged her knees to her chin. “We’ll be fine. We’ll be fine…”

An image came uncalled to her, of her husband standing still as stone while she gripped his bicep and balanced on each foot, fishing under miles of gown for her shoes. How his long, thick fingers patiently plucked her loose whenever she snagged her hair in her necklace.

 _“Kylo. Are we rich?”_ she asked him once, standing naked as an eel on top of their bed while he undressed.

He'd glanced up at her with a smirk. _"So rich.”_

She bounced gently, testing her balancing abilities against the incredible softness as she piped, _“Do you know what? I_ _’ve never been rich."_

She jumped, her long, loose hair whipping behind her. _“Not even for one day. The most I ever had was seven portions. And that seemed impossible- I had to hold them with two hands.”_

She leapt higher and spun, watching the blue-hued lights streak past her like stars at hyperspeed. If she jumped high enough, she bet she could fly right through the ship and touch the infinite Dark.

 _“Will we ever be poor?”_ she asked, breathless and confident she knew the answer.

His deep rumble was all around her and inside her as his huge, strong hands caught her feet and jerked. _“Not even a possibility.”_

She fell laughing onto the duvet, letting her hair and her arms fall where they may as he slipped her down the dark silk to meet him. From under her lashes, she watched as he pressed soft kisses along her smooth ankles and on each of her polished toes. Then softly, he parted her thighs.

 _“No-”_ she laid her foot on his chest, over his heart, savoring its violent, feral _ratta-tat-tat_. His black eyes followed her movements, like a dragon jealously counting its coins, as she rolled onto her hands and knees and looked back at him over her shoulder. Her big, horrible Sith.

_“Like this.”_

Her eyes flickered shut as he stepped in behind her, head tipping back in ecstasy before his fist finished winding in her hair, belly dipping and whirling like she was still flying through the stars.

Back in the jungle, her eyes stung. She swallowed, the last of the portion stuck to her throat like dust.

“Force, what am I doing? What am I doing, what am I doing, what-”

Tears began to fall from her lashes onto her forearms, hot as they streaked faster and faster through the grime. Her shoulders shook. She laid her head on her arms and rocked.

From the shadowed depth of the jungle beyond, a cool, murmuring mist wound its way to her through the lush.

_Rey._

Her breath hitched.

She looked all around, even up into the trees, searching for the source. The sky above the canopy darkened, casting the forest in false twilight.

Her ears strained to catch the sound of a Force bond. But all she could hear was the stuttering skip of her heart.

“Kylo?”

 _What,_ his sardonic sneer reverberated through her mind, _Are you expecting some other Sith?_

She snorted wetly, quickly wiping snot and grit off her upper lip before she groped her buns, checking for leaves and twigs. Her hand came away with a bit of spider web stuck to it, she whipped her wrist and stood, brushing the dirt off her bum. “Not likely, since you killed them all.”

She _felt_ his black smirk.

“Where are you?” She turned, and turned again, squinting against the creeping shadows. “I can’t see you.”

“No?” His low, ominous rumble was not inside her mind anymore, but outside her. “Because I see you.”

Suddenly, he was there with her in the jungle. A proud, savage parody of royalty in his dark leather gloves and quilted surcoat, his malevolent mass seemed to cover her world.

Her Light shimmered and cooed, sweetly shameless for its other, as his Darkness sluiced through the leaves and looped its long, vermillion coils around her aura. The tension twisting in her gut released and went slack. For the first time in weeks, she could draw a deep breath.

_Home._

“You’re doing this, aren’t you?” She met his seething, Lightless stare with terrible wonder. “You’re the one connecting us, right now. Through the Darkness.”

He raised his chin. “Yes.”

“This is ridiculous-” she threw up her hands, letting them fall back to her thighs with a _smack_. “Is there _anything_ you can’t do with the Force?” She crossed her arms under her breasts and shrugged. “Anything?”

His jaw worked, in that way she knew meant he was grinding down something sharp. He sighed through his nose, his massive chest rising and falling in a way she emphatically did _not_ notice.

“There is one thing,” his snark curled beckoning and familiar through the chill mist between them. “I can’t seem to hold onto my pretty little wife.”

Her lashes flickered. _Fucking flatterer…_

“That’s because you’re an asshole,” she shot back. Bitterness swamped her lungs, remembering the last time they argued. “The Force can only do so much.”

“Apparently,” he snapped, dragging his cool leer over her body.

Only a few weeks ago, if he’d looked at her that way, she would have asked him to make love to her.

The thought made her unbearably sad.

His gaze lingered on the little curve of her belly, then fell to her naked thighs. “What the Force are you wearing?”

She reached behind her and tugged down the bottom of her one-piece. Suddenly, she was very aware of every smear of dirt across her face and every sweat-damp spot in her wrappings. Her eyes flashed over his impeccable raiment before she looked away into the jungle, humiliated and flushed. “I- had to improvise…”

“With what,” he snorted, “a roll of bacta tape?”

“No,” she huffed. “Excuse me, Your Supreme Assholeness, I’m a junk-slave, not a dressmaker’s maiden.”

His jaw clenched so hard it creaked. “You are not a ju-”

“I sold the dress,” she heard herself say loudly, “and the jewels. All of them.”

She hid her married hand from his glance behind her back, her thumb worrying the red diamond ring around and around her finger. She’d been too weak to part with it at the trade post on Corellia, getting stupidly weepy when the pawn shop owner offered her three times the price of everything else for her wedding ring alone. “They’re worthless to me now, in my new life.”

“Oh, your _new_ life,” he mocked, eyes narrowed. “I see. Do you want to hear an interesting fact about pawn shops?”

She snorted. “Please, enlighten me, oh-intellectible-one.”

Black eyes blazing, he took a step through the leaves as a sneer twisted his scar. “They’re all run by cravens and thieves. Not the kind of establishment you want your pregnant wife walking into, especially when she’s dressed like _that_ -”

High above the canopy, the unnatural night boomed and cracked. Lightening lashed the jungle, illuminating its form in rapid blinks of blue-blinding light.

He paused, dragging in a deep, composing breath as an icy wind shrilled through the trees, sifting his hair and cooling the dampness in her wrappings.

She _should_ have felt trapped or panicked, but instead she felt a violent, inexplicable pull, like a scrap of metal to a magnet the size of a star.

“What are you?” she breathed.

“You know what I am,” he said coolly. He fished inside the flap of his surcoat. “It wasn’t too hard to find the con-artist who bought your jewels, for one-hundredth of their worth, might I add.”

Her heart stammered as he reached into the space between them and showed her what was in his hand. Her jewelry, every piece she’d sold, dark and glimmering like the scales of a snake in the preternatural light.

Behind her, her married hand balled, hiding the diamond under her fingers.  _Shit shit shit shit-_

His face was black smoke and triumph. “Do you want to know what I didn’t find?”

“So what?" she snapped. "Maybe I’m saving it for later. It takes a lot of credits to get away from you-”

“Cut the shit, Rey.” He flung the stones into the leaves and took another step towards her.

She took two back.

“You didn’t sell your ring, and you didn’t sell my sword. You know a bled kyber’s worth ten times that diamond. And you didn’t use the credits to get away from me-”

He loomed closer, moving silently through the leaves as if his massive footfalls bore no weight. His fury pressed down on her, pinning her in place as he closed the gap. “You used them to buy Han Solo’s ship out of hock - the one _fucking_ ship in the Galaxy you knew would set me off -  then you came home and blew up my shit.” His scar twisted. “You’re not on the fucking run. You’re trying to send me a message. Well, my darling-”

He lifted open arms.

“Here I am. You have my undivided attention.” His long, wicked teeth flashed inside a skeleton sneer. “Whatever you wanna say to me, Rey, say it. _Say it_.”

“You- I-” her eyes darted from his feral stare to the dark shape of his mouth. Unbidden, she remembered their kiss in the hanger, before his bare hands killed a star. Her core clenched.

From terror, obviously. That was her normal reaction to absolute terror. To get really, _really_ wet.

“Is he here right now?” he snarled, snapping her out of her trance.

“He- what? Who?” her brows pinched. “Luke Skywalker?”

His face contorted. “Luke Skywa-”

She shrank back as he turned and roared out at the jungle. The sky thundered, the crystal inside his light saber trembled against her in fear.

“Don’t play fucking games with me, Rey!” he whirled, cowl lashing behind him, fists balled so hard his leather creaked. “I know he’s the one you met on Tatooine. You're with him now, aren't you? _Answer me_!”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about!” she screamed back. Her heart thrashed wildly. He looked absolutely deranged. “I didn’t meet anybody on Tatooine. I landed there and I- I had walked for miles, it was ages before I found a shuttle-”

“I swear to Darkness, Rey,” he bore down on her, his voice a deadly snarl, “If I find out you’re fucking for that traitor, I will rip out his heart and feed it to you. I will snuff out every lifeform in this Galaxy, I don’t care. I’ll burn it all down-”

“Traitor- you, what? Kylo!” Realization ignited her outrage. It swept through her like wildfire, swelling in her lungs until she burst.

He thought she was having an  _affair?!_

“Are you fucking joking me right now?” Her shrill fury made him wince in spite of his animus. “Are you stupid? Are you _high_? You’re accusing me, your wife, of infidelity? Me?”

Her fists balled, she shook so hard her teeth clacked as she hissed, “What kind of desperate low-class cock warmer do you take me for? I am _mar-ried_ , I am having your _baby_ , you ungrateful ugly happabore’s ass. How _dare_ you, accuse me of something so… disgusting! Who the fuck do you think you are?”

He jabbed at the ground, “You were fucking for him when we met-”

“We weren’t married then!” she screeched, hands curled like claws juddering around her head. “God, you- you’re so fucking crazy! You make everyone around you bantha-shit nuts! This-” she pointed, “ _this_ is why I left you!”

“You didn’t leave me,” he shot back with an arrogant sneer, “you threw a fit, and when that didn’t get you what you wanted, _my attention-_ ” he thundered over her as she opened her mouth to protest, “you came home and blew up my fleet.”

“You-” she snarled, jabbing her finger into his chest. It hurt, but she was beyond caring. “This is exactly what I’m talking about, your _insanity_. You think because you’re big and powerful you get to just… take whatever you want! While the rest of us are out here, scrappin’ and scrapin’ just to get by, _you_ show up all-” she made a mouth with her hand and flapped it in front of his beak as she squawked, “ _I’m a big bad Sith and my grandfather was an Imperial Emperor so now you lot have to marry me and do what I say_.” She flicked him harshly on the nose, savoring when he jerked back, shocked. “Well you can forget it!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he reared, “I didn’t realize I supposed to fall on my fucking sword because, _Whaa whaa whaa, I’m a spoiled little Jedi and losing hurts my feelings!_ ”

“Ha ha, you’re hilarious,” she crossed her arms under her breasts, stung by his impression. “And I am _not_ a Jedi. I’m not a queen and I’m not a soldier, neither. I’m Rey of Jakku-” her breath hitched.

She swallowed, tears burning her eyes as her mouth wobbled through a breathless snarl, “and I am _not_ nothing.”

Some of the self-righteous anger slipped off his face. “Rey. You know that’s not-”

“Shut up,” she snapped. The first tears rolled down her face, humiliating and hot.

She slapped them away.

“ _You’re_ nothing. You’re selfish, and spoiled, and cruel. Nothing is ever good enough for you, you want more and more and more. You don’t care what it does to you. What it does to the people who love you-”

The knot in her throat was too hard to swallow, she choked, sobbing and stuttering around it. She was so, so angry with him. So _hurt_. “I have t-tried so h-hard, to make this f-fucking sham of a marriage w-work-”

“Rey, beloved, I am trying,” he pleaded. His eyes were a thousand times softer as he tried to take her into his arms. "I don't understand what you _want_ -"

“Don’t!” She slapped and scratched as she stumbled back, “Don’t touch me! Don’t you dare touch me!”

He stopped reaching for her, but his hands stayed outstretched, beseeching her. “My darling, you are asking too much. You know that.”

The jungle was now abominably cold. Their breaths poured out like smoke from their mouths, his in long, forceful jets, her in fast, fleeting puffs. They rose together, meeting and mingling in the canopy above them before they dissolved into nothing in the frozen air.

Frost nipped tenderly at the hot tears on her cheeks. She tipped up towards the sky, a sob snagging in her throat as her lashes flickered against soft, fast-falling snow.

“Really?” she met his desperate look with disbelief, her breath catching as she huffed out a short, dry, heartbroken laugh. “This is your answer? Magic? Kylo-”

She covered her eyes. She couldn’t look at him anymore.

“I am begging you - on my knees, Rey - to see the truth,” his words were wet and raw, “I love you. I have given you everything that I can. But you keep asking me for power-” he stopped, swallowing. He shook his head. “You haven’t earned it. You haven’t earned it, Rey.”

She could feel his conflict, etched in sorrow and anger upon his heart. The war between the only things he believed in, the two truths he worshipped. His love for her, and his loyalty to the Dark Side.

He whispered the words, desperate to soften his blow. Still, they cut her to the bone. “You are not strong enough, my love. You are not worthy.”

She looked beyond him at the jungle. Already, his Darkness had covered the broad leaves of the trees and laid a blanket of white on the ground.

“How long do you think you can last, before it kills you?” her voice sounded alien to her ears. Harsh, distant. Metallic, almost. She watched the snow drift down in small shafts through the thick canopy above. “The Dark. How long before it eats you alive?”

On his face was an emotion she’d never seen in him before.

Fear.

He stepped back as if he’d been burned. “You know nothing about the Dark Side.”

“I keep praying you’re right,” she whispered. Her hands sheltered their baby where it lay small and unknowing inside her. She felt no shame in showing her naked terror, as scenes from her visions fell past her eyes.

Her husband, torn apart by his Darkness.

She heard a murmur, like a shadowy sentence spoken through water. Her husband glanced to the side, as if he could see the source.

Someone was speaking to him on his side of the bond. She caught bits and pieces, like random corners of a puzzle, _“Picked up her signature... Safestarian System… tropical planet...”_

“Stay where you are,” he demanded, “I mean it.”

He closed their bond.

His Darkness vanished under the sweltering glare of the furious sun. Its light poured down through the tree growth and reflected off the snow, drenching her world in fast-melting drips of gold.

Heart fading, she turned east, towards her ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you once again to InspirationalMisquotes for being my stage mom and fixing the rip in my gown ten seconds before the evening wear competition starts. I know you know what I mean ;)
> 
> Okay okay SO- Rey is over his shit and feelin' herself, in a homemade bathing suit in the rainforest. Bet you didn't see THAT coming. :D
> 
> Can I just say - I love Rey. She's the coolest, and the realest, and a good, good egg.


	32. If This Will Be Anything, Then Let It Be Disaster. Because A Mouthful Of Bees Couldn't Stop Me From Whispering, "I Don't Love You"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo is handling the separation from his wife extremely well. As we all expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 36 Days Since Rey Left

A gawky, long-limbed boy of thirteen, Ren wrenched back his arm and hurled another rock into the lake.

Behind him, his uncle sighed. _“Ben-_

 _“There’s no way you killed Darth Vader!”_ he snapped. He ducked down by his boots, scratching mercilessly through the sand for the largest stone he could find. As he dug, cool, silty murk pressed beneath his nails, creating a dull, uncomfortable stretch that mirrored the ache inside his chest. _"You’re too weak.”_

 _They are all weak,_ the voice whispered. It was softly sympathetic, like a breath blown to bring flame to life. _They carry the Light._

Ren backed up from the shore and cocked his arm. Kicking off, he ran to the edge of the gently licking waves and hurled the rock.

 _"I hate you!"_   he screamed it with all of his lungs.

The stone tore out over the glassine surface to the very heart of the lake, where it rent the placid face of the water in a crescendo of white froth.

His chest heaved. He balled his fists and roared again. _"I hate you!"_

It wasn't one thing he hated, so much as he hated everything all at once. This place, his uncle, with his pure, all-seeing eyes and damnable Light. His mother, how she looked at him, like some creature that had crawled out to her from under a rock, and not a son of her own flesh and blood. But more than all of it, he hated Han Solo.

That smug, silver-tongued, philandering drunk. That fucking _mongrel._

His eyes stung.

He was _nothing_ like his father. He was not.

He was not.

_“I didn’t kill Darth Vader.”_

His uncle’s words, like his sandaled feet appearing beside his on the wet, stone-dappled sand, startled him.

His vision blurred and bled together, like a watercolor dipped into the cool, dark water, so that he had to blink and cover his shame with the back of his pale, trembling hand. His shoulders shook with the force of his weeping. He did not understand.

 _“I didn’t kill my father,”_ his uncle repeated. His voice sounded a little farther away by his side.

His uncle was crouching on the shore, fingers gently coaxing a stone from the sand. He stood. _“Darth Vader sacrificed himself.”_

Ren watched his uncle rub his prize like something precious between his false, robotic fingers, wearing away the grit and the mud. His stone was darker than the others tucked into the silt, black and small and perfectly smooth.

 _“That doesn’t make sense…”_ Ren winced against the naked flush of sunset to see into his uncle’s face. _“He had all the power. Why would he do that?”_

The ripples from the rock Ren cast so furiously were fading, the last echoes of a sigh on the calm surface of the waters.

 _"Well,”_ Luke looked at him. The setting sun slanted through his eyes, illuminating the Light behind them so that they seemed to burn with love. _“Some things are more important than power.”_

He turned and flicked his wrist, and the smooth, black stone spanned out over the lake, dipping down to sweetly kiss the waters. It sailed far, far beyond where Ren’s own wrath had landed, disappearing into twilight’s dark mouth.

Grief edged in rage churned within Ren’s heart. He stared sneering out through the encroaching night, baring his teeth at the last, lingering haze of sunlight.

“ _Nothing is more important than power,”_ he snarled.

His uncle’s hand, the one that still lived, fell onto his shoulder. Its weight was almost unbearably warm.

 _“Come inside, son,”_ he said. _“It’s getting dark.”_

 

 

 

 

“My Lord-”

He gripped the steel basin until the metal groaned as Darkness, muscular and razor-scaled, constricted around his organs. His leather armguards creaked. Blood dripped down his tongue between his teeth.

He hocked and spat. “What?”

Even though the small refresher of his captain’s quarters was pitch-black, in the mirror he could clearly see the Captain’s stricken expression over his shoulder.

She was staring at his bare back. Or rather, at the angry, undulating red patterns his power made as it sluiced and coiled beneath his skin.

“Does it hurt?” she asked. Her voice was unusually soft.

He straightened, even as his guts burned and the Darkness wrung his lungs. “No.”

The voices behind his eyes whooped and hollered, _Liar liar, Sith on fire!_

“We’re landing,” she said. Her eyes followed a line of fury that streaked through his shoulders.

He nodded, breath arrested as he braced for the next churn, each more crippling than the last.

The Captain turned. He waited until the pneumatic doors whooshed closed behind her, and her heavy chrome footsteps faded down the galley, before he fell over the sink and retched.

With jaded eyes, the Great Dark sneered.

He shuddered, moaning, and splashed himself with water as cold as it would come from the tap. It dripped down the contours of his face and from the tips of his hair back into the sink, whirling away with it blood and bile and chewed out bits of soul. Preparing for more, he beat back the ache in his breast with his wet leather fist and snarled.

“Kylo?”

The scared, trembling whisper was his wife's.

His cool stare found hers within the mirror. Pressed back into the corner, her big, sorrow-filled eyes glimmered like wet gold inside the dark.

A self-deprecating smirk twisted his scar. He rasped, “What are you looking at?”

She wiped her cheeks and said nothing.

Time unraveled and slipped away as they stared into each other through their reflections. The constant twist and virulent whispers of the Dark and of the Siths disintegrated into nothing. There was only her inside the mirror. Her body, her face, the sweet rise and fall of her breasts.

Beauty.

His heart thrashed in his throat, choking the breath out of him and damming back the words he wanted to say. _I love you. Take all of it. Stay with me._

_Stay with me._

Her lips parted. She drew a breath. 

His ship jolted out of hyperspeed. It rattled the mirror, disrupted the smooth surface of his mind.

He blinked, and she was gone.

Slowly, he looked back at the man she left behind. A worthless stranger with dark, hopeless eyes.

He reached for his mask.

 

 

 

“Fan out,” he told his battalion leaders, as more troops poured out like smoke from the durasteel mouth of his Imperial shuttle. “Take everything you find and put it on this ship.”

“Yes sir,” they unisoned. Their boots made hollow sounds on the cooled, hard magma.

Even through the cooling ventilators in his mask, the putrid air on Mustafar seared his lungs. He rasped against the miasma of ash and smoldering sulfur from the cracks that marred the volcanic landscape like slashes from a great clawed hand.

Natural hydrogen gases leeched up from underground chasms where the surface was split widest. It pooled and ignited where it met the hot, sizzling air on the surface, creating small lakes of blue fire like random tide pools on the shore. Their violet-tipped tongues lashed at the rent charcoal sky.

He stared out through his visor across the burning landscape, to where the live, slow-moving lava ran like open veins through the arid tundra towards a man-made mote a few kilometers ahead. Inside its blue-flamed embrace, a great forked fang jutted taller than a mountain to pierce the clouds.

His grandfather’s castle.

Hewn from smooth-planed obsidian culled from the ancient Sith caves thousands of meters below it, at the vortex of the strongest convergence of Dark energy in the Galaxy, it was a tuning fork for the Dark Side. His grandfather had it comissioned as a testament to his tremendous commitment to the Sith religion, and as tribute to the Darkness. At over eight hundred meters tall and three hundred meters in diameter at its base, it was the greatest temple to power a Sith Lord had ever built.

And beside it, dwarfed by the malevolent shadow it cast across the poisoned landscape, was the _Millennium Falcon._ It sat tilted slightly on its axis, like a child’s toy lying forgotten beneath a tree.

 _“This is us,”_ her voice, musical and small, spanned across systems and stars to whisper into his heart. _“You and me. The Great Big Dark, and the Light of the furthest star.”_

 _She is not here,_ the Dark seethed.

His gut gripped. He rammed his fist into the pain and spat, "I know that." 

“Supreme Leader-”

“What?” He whipped around, cowl fluttering in the fetid wind, as menace, virulent and crimson-colored, cracked through his aura.

The General looked past him, towards the Falcon. His shoulders were sunken in, expression grim.

Ren’s snarl panned through the speech grate of his mask. “Spit it out, Hux.”

“The microwave scanners are not detecting her signature here or in any nearby systems."

"And?"

"Additionally, we were unable to locate the search drone that discovered her in this location-” Here, the General hesitated. “We… suspect she lured the drone into some type of trap, disabled its distress protocols, and abducted it.”

“My wife… stole a search craft.”

To his credit, the General hardly flinched. “Our best estimation is she used it to get past our patrol fleet outside of this quadrant.”

The Darkness smirked wryly. _Our dear one is very clever._

“So what you’re telling me is,” Ren’s eyes narrowed dangerously, “she hijacked a search drone, ripped out its distress beacon, and is using it to-” he rolled his hand, “gallivant around my Galaxy, undetected?”

The General shifted his stance, aiming his gaze at one of Ren’s shoulders. “So it appears, sir.”

Ren snorted. His gloved fingers dug under his cowl, where he sloughed sweat and ash that had crept and clung to his neck. He shook his head at the roiling, murk-colored sky. “Un- _fucking_ -believable. How? How is she doing this?”

“Well, I imagine that,” sweat trickled generously down the General’s temples as he concentrated on arranging his cuffs, “for a scavenger and Rebel scum, the task was quite simple.”

Ren loomed over him as, above them, the sky crackled with cold fissures of lightning. “ _What_ did you call her?”

“Sir,” the General met his gaze. There was terror and certainty behind his pale blue eyes. “It is high-time we call a spade a spade.”

In the same breath Ren raised his clenched fist and uncurled his fingers, the General’s throat was inside his grip. He lifted and throttled, showing teeth behind his mask, “How about I call you _dead_ , you little rat-”

“Oh, for the love of Darkness. Put him down.” Captain Phasma’s chrome form materialized out of the sweltering smog. “Honestly, you both are so prone to histrionics it’s despicable. _Put him down_ , I said.”

He released the General, letting him fall through his fingers and land on his knees on the porous volcanic rock by his feet.

“The bomb squad says the ship is clear of explosives,” the Captain spoke over Hux’s loud, harsh hacking. Her helmet turned back in the direction of the _Falcon._ “I’ve radioed for a rig to haul it to one of our remote hangers-”

“No.” Ren rolled his lips together, wicking sweat as he sluiced still more off his neck onto the back of his glove. The heat on this planet was malicious, inescapable. “I want it towed back to Base.”

Down on the ground, the General wheezed and spat, “Oh, that’s a bloody brilliant idea-”

“Your Maleficence.” The Captain stepped closer, angling her helmet upwards. Her voice was urgent and low. “Given the state of things, do you really think it’s wise for your father’s ship to be so close at hand?”

He looked back at the black, forked tower reaching through the sky. Inside his bones, he could feel the dark, malevolent murmurs vibrating between its prongs.

A wry smirk wrung his scar.

He reached down and grasped both of the General’s lapels in one huge hand. As if he weighed nothing at all, Ren lifted him to his feet. “Take that piece of shit back to Base,” he shoved Hux away, “Now. Phasma, you’re with me.”

“Where are we going?”

His head start towards the mote of blue flames was her answer.

 

 

 

Inside the castle, walled off from the burning plain, the air was frozen ice.

“It’s completely empty,” the Captain could not hide her shock. She tilted her visor back, taking in the seemingly endless, uninterrupted span of smooth obsidian up to where the shadows obscured its pinnacle. All around them, the Dark energy being drawn down from its fork roiled like a living fog. “It’s… some kind of… storage unit. Like a well.”

“No.” He pressed his thumbs into the mechanisms at his jaw and the lock on his mask disengaged with a vaporous sigh. His Darkness swelled beyond him and he breathed deeply, at home in the desolate, frozen, near-perfect dark.

A hundred meters in front of them, at the exact center of this cavernous space, his naked eyesight saw its only object.

A bacta tank.

“It’s a power cell,” he said. “This is where my grandfather communed with the Darkness.”

“It’s a meditation room,” she turned in a slow circle, taking in the tower with new awe. “His own room of A Thousand Siths.”

“Yes. Hold this,” he handed her his mask. “Stay here. It will get colder towards the center.” He smiled wryly, “You wouldn’t survive.”

The Captain gestured at the moving, murmuring mists. “But then how could Her Majesty have passed?”

“I don’t know,” was his honest answer. His head tipped back, his gaze traveled up to the apex above them. “It should have killed her, but- She’s… controlling it, somehow. The Darkness.” He looked back at Phasma. “It _listens_ to her Light.”

Her helmet cocked. “Is that usual? For your kind?”

“No, it's not.” He smirked, picturing his small wife. “But neither is she.”

His first step towards the bacta tank parted the freezing miasma.

“Wait here,” he told the Captain over his shoulder.

Like the soft flicker of a holoprojection, images of his wife winked briefly before his eyes as he walked. They were disjointed, distant, out of touch with order or time. It struck him how so few days and hours could eclipse the entire arc of his memory to become the sum total of his life.

Happiness, he realized, could rewrite time.

His footsteps were soundless in the silent, suffocating presence of the Dark. As he drew closer to the bacta tank, he sensed a presence beside him. But when he turned and looked, he was completely alone. Not even the Captain was visible through the fog.

He tried to imagine his wife, small and dressed only in her handmade wrappings, her little hand laid over the life inside her, picking her way through the dark. He couldn’t.

“Why would she come here?” he asked the Darkness.

_Because-_

He stopped in front of the tank and stooped.

There, at its base, wound tenderly with white string and preserved in coldness, was a posy of perfect roses.

The Dark sunk its sharp teeth into his liver and the soft tissue behind his ribs and smiled. _She loves Us._

 

 

 

At the mouth of the tower, from where he stood in its shadowed arch, coldness rolling out to meet the immutable heat with a violent hiss, he looked out across magma rock and blue lakes of fire.

Beyond his ship, past the legions of troopers scouring the scorched wasteland, a figure stood out on the horizon.

His dark Masters robes lifted with the sweltering wind.

“Your Majesty,” the Captain spoke with her finger near the comm key in her helmet. “I’ve just heard from Base One. Your mother is awake. She’s asking for you.”

He glanced at the roses cradled in the valley of his monstrous hand. Their red petals seemed to deepen against his glove. “Is she? Well, wonders of the Force never cease.”

“Apparently not.”

Carefully, as if he was afraid they’d crumble into dust, he folded the flowers into the shelter of his coldness.

“Prepare my ship, Captain.”

He left her behind to relay the order and began the long trek back to the durasteel maw and his captain’s quarters.

He did not look back at the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I've been asked a time or twenty, "How can Kylo love her if there's no Light in him?" and "Why doesn't he just change so they can be together?" 
> 
> My favorite thing Adam Driver said about his character is, "Kylo Ren isn't evil, he just thinks he's right." My hope is that, as this work has unfolded, Kylo's perspective has become clearer. More relatable. Also, that love, as both a collection of neurchemical impulses and as action, feels less binary, and not limited to just the righteous or the penitent. 
> 
> Anyway-
> 
> Peeps, we are three chapters away from the end. Holy mother of God, Pastel is going to finish a project!


	33. Go Follow Your Gem, Your White-feathered Friend. Icarus, Point to the Sun.

The walk to his mother’s infirmary room was a slow one.

He left Captain Phasma and the General behind. Three separate times, the Captain insisted she accompany him, until at last, Hux touched her shoulder and offered decorously, _“Best leave it alone, Phasma.”_

She disappeared after that, without a word to either of them.

“Her condition is quite critical,” the General explained about his Mother as they deplaned. “It seems before her stroke, she suffered a series of small heart attacks. Each incident was mild in isolation, but the cumulative effect has been catastrophic.”

“She’s dying,” Ren spoke plainly through his mask as they passed below the ventilation shaft that spanned upward through _The Conqueror_. He carried his wife’s roses against his chest.

“Correct. The drones estimate she does not have long.”

Ren rode the elevator to the medical bay alone, propped against the wall, his eyes closed behind his visor. A sense of foreboding settled like a stone in his pit as, with cool detachment, scenes from his childhood played silently on the back of his mind. Soft, soundless pictures of holding her smiling face between his small hands. Then a whiskey bottle smashing, his mother’s beautiful face twisted as she screamed savage accusations at his father. The sight of her heartbroken weeping, alone on her huge canopy bed, her hair loose from its fragile, elegant braiding. Her hand clamped around his little arm, hard and hurting, as she shook him, her mouth moving with the soundless words he’d memorized, _What’s the matter with you, why did you do that?_ And her condemnation, cold and final, _You’re just like him. You’re just like your father._ Then nothing at all of her. The memories stopped, there was nothing but emptiness inside the spaces where she should have been.

He paused outside the pneumatic doors, listening to the rhythmic hiss of his breath as he relived their last meeting. The crimes she’d accused him of. The truths she confessed.

Anger swallowed his heart.

If his mother had come to ask for his forgiveness, he would not give it to her.

 _Son of Smuggler is stalling,_ snickered the Siths. _What is he afraid to see, hm?_

He entered the security sequence to open the doors, and light as pure as the stars poured out into the corridor.

The large room was perfectly white.

In its center, led by cables the color of winter, a steel cryochamber rested with its diamond-glass hatch open, light arcing through the clear, curved surface of the glass. White gauze from the deeply set cradle trailed like suspended snowfall over its lip to the floor. An alabaster terminal hummed and blipped peacefully beside it.

And at its helm, tipped forward slightly, still as if in sleep, his mother’s ancient protocol bot gleamed like burnished gold inside the sun.

“C?”

Its intake sockets dilated in and out as it rose, drawing up its arms while it went in a gesture was achingly familiar.

“My, Master Solo,” it greeted him, as if he were still a boy of four, and not an emperor. “How good of you to come. Won’t you please come in?”

He hesitated. Like the shadow of a buzzard, the premonition of sorrow swooped over his soul, the same way it had when he landed on Starkiller.

The night he killed his father.

He stepped through the doorway, into the light. He could not see her face, so deep was the cradle of the cryochamber. His form, mountainous and absolutely black, drifted like Death through the seamless white. He remembered the snow and the imp at the last Jedi temple as his eyes fixed at the spot where he expected her face to appear.

But the chamber was empty.

“Ben? Is that you?”

Her voice, frail and crackled like glass before the shatter, floated from a corner to his left. It swept through him, a phantom passing through the living, stopping to wring his heart. Through his visor, he found her where she stood whiter than the room itself, leaning on her pale cane, staring through the single port window at the blackness beyond them.

“Mother,” he said.

She turned laboriously, and froze. Her face, wreathed by the circle of star-studded night, withered and ashed.

“Oh my,” chirped the old droid, as he caught his mother while she fainted.

 

 

 

 

Rey’s face pinched. She torqued her wrench with all her might.

“There, that should do it… one more… good twist and…” The bolt trembled and yielded one more right turn. “Ha!”

She sat back on her heels, regarding her homemade satellite with a heavy, satisfied sigh. The Jakkuvian sun bore down on its exposed solar charger like a burning eye, and soon the lopsided dish she’d fashioned out of the search drone’s transponder began to rotate on its axis, the antenna in its center turned up towards the colorless sky.

If even a single ship from her husband’s fleet entered the system, she would know it.

Sweat poured through her as she stood, she felt it slid between her skin and the wrappings around her breast and her sex. Exhausted from the hard labor and the relentless, merciless heat of the desert, she swayed back to the shelter of her AT-AT.

Her childhood hovel was ransacked when she found it. Bedding ripped and shredded, her makeshift furniture smashed, the little dolls she’d fashioned from scraps all burned or strewn in parts across the floor. The wall where she’d marked her time as a slave was written over, some words she could sound out, others she couldn’t or couldn’t bring herself to. They were all the same, essentially. Their meaning was as crude and ugly as the way they were written, in red, juddering letters across the walls of her home.

_Cockslave. Sith-lover. Whore._

She turned her back on them, kneeling by a newly repaired hot plate to heat water for her meal.

The planet was abandoned, its trading post all but destroyed by what she guessed was a fire. Rooting through the soot and cinder, she found a trunk of portions and a key to the well Plutt had guarded so severely. She made trips back-and-forth with rope and sled, towing the supplies to her little post in the sand. It was habit, a yearning for something familiar, that made her stay in the AT-AT, rather than closer to town. She came back to Jakku out of desperation, searching for the lost feeling of home. But even after she hauled and swept away the debris, she felt she was standing in a hollow, lonely shell.

Home, when she let herself picture it, was a dark labyrinth of blue-lit corridors and cool, smooth tile.

She wiped her eyes on her naked shoulder and sniffed as her fingers tap-tapped ration powder into her bowl of steaming water. She swirled her finger in the mixture, watching as her meal grew from the soggy dredges clinging to the sides of the bowl.

Inside her, her sweet little dark pittered and spun.

“Yes yes, lovie. Sup’s on,” she spoke softly to her baby as she stood. “Come on, then. We’ll have it outside.”

Holding her portion and a can of water high, she picked her way through the sand to find shade on the eastern side of her AT. Tucking in against the cooling metal, she folded her knees up to her chin and ate, speaking to her baby in a gentle hush as sun set upon them.

Thirty-seven days.

 

 

 

 

_Benjamin._

He was dreaming a lonely dream, about orange sunsets and sand. Miles and miles of it, pleated into irregular patterns by dunes and valleys, like lifelines on a palm, reaching ever for the encroaching dark-

“Benjamin.”

He sat up in the seat he had brought to her room. Like everything but him, it was white. “I’m here.”

She gazed solemnly at him from her cradle. Her hair and face were dove-white, difficult to distinguish against the pillow. She had removed her oxygen, the mask lay folded in her small, grey hands, tucked away against her breast.

“Take off that mask.”

Her voice was a regal, reedy rasp.

Behind the speech grate, a wry smirk twisted his scar. He answered quietly, “What do you think you’ll see if I do?”

“The face of my son.”

His smile slipped.

“Mother,” through the sieve, his tender speech was alien and distorted. “Your son is gone. He was weak, foolish. Like his father.” Han Solo’s face, brilliant and handsome, flickered in his mind. “So I destroyed him.”

“N-nonsense,” she puffed and gasped. “Ta-take off that ma-”

Her breath caught and she rattled, eyes shutting as if the act of keeping them open made her breathless. Air raked wetly across her lungs.

 _Soon,_ purred the Dark.

Carefully, he lifted her hands to cover her with the oxygen, and with his other, reached up and disengaged the lock on his mask. The apparatus separated with a cool, sinister sound. He closed his eyes, bracing for the blinding strike of light. As he drew it away, his hair dragged across his brow.

The room was so white-bright it sang in his ears, a sharp, metallic ring over the serene beep of the monitors and her harsh, labored breath.

“Oh, Benjamin,” she sighed. The oxygen muted her voice, but it could not mask her sorrow.

Her hand unwound from his and warbled up to hold his ruined cheek. Her touch burned him, the voices behind his eyes leapt back from its sear, but he held perfectly still, concentrating on the thrash of his breaking heart as she stroked the black tendrils from his face.

“You’re so cold.”

“Yes.” He pressed his lips together to hide their tremor.

 _Darkness,_ he called.

But it would not answer.

“Look at me, my darling.”

He did not feel the tears until they fell from his lashes as he opened his eyes. Her face prismed through his grief. His words sawed out, thick and raw. “You’re dying.”

“Yes.” She thumbed his cheeks, stroked tenderly though his hair. “I certainly am.”

She shut hers eyes and let her hand drift down to settle feather-soft over his heart.

He covered it with his black-gloved palm and pressed.

“So cold,” she sighed again.

“Do you-” he stopped, choking on the ache. “Do you want me to get the pilot?”

Even through the glare of white, he saw one corner of her long, thin mouth tick upwards beyond her oxygen. “Why, am I flying somewhere?”

He snorted wetly, and tried again. “I can have C-3 brought back-”

“Ludicrous.” Her fingertips, small and nearly translucent, appeared in the spaces between his much larger fingers. Slowly, like seedheads creeping through moist, black earth to meet the sun, they grew longer, until she could curl them ever-slightly over his. “My son is here now. That’s all I need.”

His heart squeezed. _Ludicrous._

_So that’s where my wife learned it._

He looked away from her closed, peaceful expression, to the posy of roses he laid on the table beside her, their crimson petals soft and deep like wet velvet against the searing white. He stared into their delicate, intricate folds, letting his sanity unwind, until he thought he heard their secrets creeping up like aphids from their bound, budding hearts.

 _I love you_ , his wife had whispered into them, kneeling in front of his grandfather’s bacta tank. _I love you, Kylo Ren._

He hung his head _._

“Are those for me?” His mother had removed her oxygen again. Her voice was as delicate as a spider’s web, trembling with fragile strength beneath the dew.

He snorted softly. “Actually, they’re for me. From my wife.”

“Mm.” She closed her eyes. “How’s that going?”

“It’s going really well,” he scrubbed his gloved hand over his face and sat back in his seat. His legs stretched long alongside her cryochamber. “She left me, as I’m sure Hux has told you. Took my heir, my light saber, blew up my flagship- Oh, and then she came back and demolished my armada.”

His mother chuckled.

“Now she’s off, doing Force knows what.”

“Developing a junior hobby in horticulture, apparently,” she observed, the paper-thin skin around her mouth creasing in amusement.

“Apparently,” he echoed wryly.

“My Aalderaanian mother had a great love of roses. She grew gardens of them, every kind and every color in the Galaxy-”

A sad smile flitted across his features. “I remember you telling me.”

“I never cared for them. Too many thorns for me.” She sighed. The sound was strangled and lonely in the quiet. “I wanted love to be easy. To be free. I didn’t want the responsibility of caring for it. Of making it grow. I wanted the beauty of the blooms, but not the reality of the thorns.”

He gave a short, mirthless laugh. “What a disappointment I must have been.”

“Yes, I am disappointed. But not in you.”

He looked at her.

She was watching him with soft, dark eyes exactly like his own. Her face was desperately sad. “I failed you-”

Before, he could recount every slight, every absence, every hard-hearted word she’d ever struck him with. But now, in this moment with her, those memories were not. All he could see through the lens of loss was her eternally beautiful face, laughing with him as she held him to her breast.

“No,” he took her hands in his. They fit together in the center of his palm. “You didn’t.” He shook his head. “You didn’t.”

The tears in her eyes fell bright as diamonds down her face into her hair. “I wasn’t there, Ben. I wasn’t there for you- for my baby. My darling boy-”

“No, no,” he laid her hands against her breast and gathered her tenderly in his arms. She was his child now, and she weighed nothing, as if he held only light. He rocked her.

“Benjamin,” she sobbed. Her tears were warm on his neck.

“Shh,” he pressed her closer, ignoring the agonizing sear of her Light. He pressed as if to tuck her forever inside his heart. “You’re still holding on. Let go of me. Let go. Let go-”

Over and over again, he whispered into her hair. Until her soul sighed, and her body lightened, and her life flickered out like a candle in the dark.

She died in his arms.

He continued to rock her as gradually, the room around them darkened to its true hue. Black walls, black tile, dim blue-lit tracks receded into the dark ceiling above.

He held her against his heart.

 

 

 

Beneath a sea of stars, Rey crested yet another gentle slope. Her sled, weighed carefully with a small load of supplies, made a soft, velvety sound as it slid through the still-warm sand behind her.

Her heart pinged. The life inside her leapt, then held very still.

Slowly, she turned.

The clear, brilliant dome of night seemed to press down on her as her eyes sought the stars.

They were weeping.

 

 

 

He ordered her casket made white.

He carried it himself, her single pall bearer, through the halls of his ship. Her weight was so slight, so infinitesimally small, that he kept glancing through the diamond-glass lid to make sure she was inside.

Swaddled in cool white silk, hair elegantly braided by his own hands, her hands folded against her breast. She carried his roses over her heart. The image reminded him of the little dancer hidden away in her jewelry box. Its pretty, phantom plink mocked him as he lurched, slow and measured, down the bridge.

There were no troops, no guardsmen, no one in the launch bay except for himself, the General, the Captain, and his mother’s old shuffling protocol bot. His cowl swayed behind him, his heavy footfall muted to his ears by the persistent, crystalline chime of the jewelry box. Behind his eyes, the Siths danced with one another in ghoulish parody of a waltz, as the Great Dark watched from above, smiling satisfied with all of its gruesome teeth.

His breath hissed through the apparatus. From behind his visor, he looked out through the transpari-barrier into the eye of a mature star. Along its shifting, living surface, solar flares flashed in quicksilver-gold.

“This is truly lovely, Your Majesty.”

It was the old droid that spoke. They were alone at the barrier now, the General and the Captain remained up on the bridge, two black vultures watching from above. Light reflected in bot’s body, burnishing it almost white as it angled itself to look into his face.

“The Princess would be most approving.”

Strange, how something metal and wire could still carry a tremor of grief in its voice.

“Is there anything you want to say?” he heard himself ask it. The Darkness coiled tighter around his throat, but he persisted. “Goodbye, perhaps?”

The droid’s intake sockets dilated. For a moment, it studied him, then it cocked its waist and turned ou towards the star. “Thank you, sir. I fear I have already said too many goodbyes for my half-lives. Still, she was my oldest and dearest companion. I shall miss her terribly.” Its head twitched. “I really shall.”

For a moment, they stood together in silence, looking out into the warmth of the sun.

“Is there… something you would like to say, Master Solo?” It teetered back around to look at him. “Goodbye, perhaps?”

“No,” he said. Then he walked forward through the barrier, and laid her to rest with the Light.

 

 

 

“Sir?” the Captain spoke from the doorway.

“What?” he snarled hoarsely.

He knelt alone in the pitch-dark of his apartment, pain twisting through him, sharp and endless and sweet. His grandfather’s commission played softly in the background to drown out the phantom plink of the music box and the jeers of the Siths and the Great Dark. He was grateful for the cover of darkness which masked the wreckage, smashed furniture and broken glass, and his own nakedness, streaked with the angry welts where his blunt, thick fingers had tried to dig out his organs and heart. “What do you want?”

“I came to ask about the pilot-”

“Give him a ship,” he gritted the words through his teeth as the coils of Darkness wound tighter.

She balked. “But sir, he’s a Rebel and an agitator-”

“ _Give him a ship_!” he roared. He swept up a piece of the sectional.

It struck the wall with a splintering smash.

“I want that dog _out_ _of my Galaxy_!” Hatred, animate and tangible, lit up his aura. “That’s an order!”

“Very well,” the Captain’s tone was formal, remote. “And the protocol bot, sir? Shall we compact it?”

He rose, and his Darkness rose with him. “Don’t you touch that fucking droid-”

“You need to take control of your emotions.”

“And you,” he loomed over her. “Need to do your fucking job. Go find my wife.”

She raised her chin. “That is not my job-”

Darkshear cracked down and rent the tile next to them. His voice was the rumble of thunder. “It is your job because I say it is. Now find. My fucking. _Wife_.”

Through the pitch-black, he saw her eye move frantically from side-to-side. She saluted. “Understood.”

The doors closed behind her, and she was gone.

“That’s right, hot shot. Show her who’s boss.” The stench of rent ozone and cauterized flesh and the sardonic gravel of his father’s voice filled the room. “You’re really battin’ a thousand with women these days.”

Ren’s gut gripped, burning as it wrenched. He stumbled back into the room and fell on his knees. His body convulsed.

“Hang in there, partner. It’s almost over.” He felt the weight of his father’s warm, solid hand on his shoulder. “It’s almost over.”

 _“Han,”_ his mother was suddenly there, on the balcony, looking down on them in the twilit courtyard below. Her tone was sharp, but she was smiling. _“He’s going to hurt someone. Probably you.”_

 _“Relax, Your Worhsip,”_ over his shoulder, Ren watched his father aim a lopsided grin and a set of hooded eyes up at her from where he was kneeling beside Ren in the soft grass.

His mother smiled and blushed.

Ren’s chest ached with warmth.

 _“Okay, partner,”_ Han arms encircled him, warm and protective and strong. He hitched the butt of the blaster snugly into the pit of Ren’s tiny arm and snapped up the scope. _“We got the whole Republic watchin’ us, so don’t screw this up. You’ll make us both look bad in front of your mother.”_

Ren shook his hair of his eyes and drew his solemn little mouth into a line. _“Kay, Dad.”_

_“Alright. Close one eye – yep, just like that – look through that loop right there. Got your target?”_

Ren nodded, and the whole setup warbled. _“Got it.”_

 _“Good.”_ His father’s long, sure fingers curled over Ren’s. He tucked his chin on Ren’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, _“Ready? On the count’a three. One, two-”_

At the last second, Ren’s eyes pinched shut as together they pulled the trigger.

The glass bottle on the other side of the courtyard shattered.

On the balcony, his mother whistled and clapped.

 _“Atta boy!”_ Han ruffled his hair and shot his mother a shit-eating grin. _“What’d I tell yah, Lei? Chip off the ol’ block.”_

Overwhelmed with a soft, hot emotion, Ren had turned his face into his father’s neck. Han clapped his little belly softly and kissed his hair. _“You’re great, son. Yah did great.”_

Back in his apartment, naked on his hands and knees amongst his ruin, Ren’s teeth clenched so hard they creaked.

“Do you know why?” he spat at the phantoms. “Do you know why they called me Son of Smuggler? Do you?”

“Yeah.” His father stroked his hair, his touch time-weathered and feather soft. “I know. I loved you too, Ben. I loved you too.”

The Dark was all around him, a black, shifting, low-murmuring animus. His skin crawled and his organs burned with cold fire as he unraveled beyond grief, past desolation, into the madness rising up to meet him.

“Darkness,” he called, lost on his forearms and knees, forehead pressed into the floor, spit from his lips trailing back to the tile. Every line in his face was creased with agony as he called in a broken whimper, “Darkness… Darkness…”

“Shh, Kylo. It’s alright.” It was a soft voice, young and feminine and familiar. Small, gentle fingers trailed warmth across his scalp.

The raw, razoring coil around his lungs lifted, and the murmurs faded to silence.

Heartbreak made his throat dry, his tongue thick and stupid inside his mouth. He kept his eyes shut, unwilling to confront the illusion, and he dragged himself closer to her oasis. When the top of his head touched her soft, bare belly, he pressed his face into her and sighed.

“I’m here. I’m right here.” She smoothed back the hair from his forehead, curling it behind his ears. “It’s all going to be alright.”

“I killed her,” he sobbed his confession into her skin, his lips moving slow and slick across her flesh. “I killed her. I killed my mother-”

She folded over him. Her arms came around the span of his wide, solid waist.

“You didn’t,” she promised. She drew up her knees and held him with her whole body as she began to rock. A soft, side-to-side motion that reminded him of tree boughs swaying in the wind.

His arms waded through glass and ruin to wrap around her, he clung to her so that the tide couldn’t drag him back into the black ocean’s freezing maw. Her skin was so warm it stung, like laying a hand on hot metal, but it was thousand times more tolerable than his mother’s Light, and a thousand times softer than his Darkness.

He nuzzled deep into her, burrowing between her thighs and inhaling her scent through her thin, damp wrappings.

_Rey. Rey Rey Rey Rey Rey-_

He was dreaming. This had to be a dream. Or he was dying.

_Dying-_

“Get away,” he warned into her thighs. His head was too heavy to lift. He was so tired. “Darkness wants death-”

She snorted. “Wants a thrashin’, s’what it wants.” She laid her hot little cheek in the cradle between his shoulders. “Sleep.”

He drew another deep breath, and thought of the life inside her. His arms tightened around her.

_My baby._

“I’ll protect you,” she said.

He wanted laugh, to tell her to run, but she was yawning against his back, her hot, sweet breath rolling across his skin like bath water as she burrowed even deeper into him.

Down he slide, in slow spirals, into his first sleep in weeks.

 

 

 

 

He dreamt about Starkiller.

Harsh, icy winds howling snow in diagonal sheets across the tundra. His father’s face, transformed first by surprise, then by betrayal, the sensation of his cheek slipping from his father’s fingers as Han fell from the walkway into the heart of the reactor.

The traitor.

Holding his grandfather’s saber aloft, his dark, handsome face burnished in its blue light.

His wife, so impossibly young, unimaginably small, fleeing him through the forest. Snow falling fast and thick around her.

_Fear._

The dull, vague ache in his gut, next to the blistering wound from the Wookie’s blast-shot, was fear.

Not of her.

But of a universe without her.

In his dream, she stalked around him. Teeth bared, sword trembling in her awesome grip. He heard the voice of the Great Dark now, as he did back then.

_Crush her. She carries the Light._

He let her mark him instead.

The agony was exquisite, as was the punishment the Darkness doled out after. It ripped through his spine and boiled all his organs, it made him convulse on his hands and knees and seizure.

Divine rapture, his love for her. More painful than any love he’d ever known, and that was saying something. His mother was the Ice Princess, and his uncle had tried to murder him.

_Still._

The scene shifted around him, molding and melting in that way only dreams can.

He fell down through darkness, into a room on fire.

Snoke’s throne room. The body of his master cleaved in half at his feet. The unbelievable amount of blood.

And her eyes, so pure and beautiful, shining gold in the hellish light.

 _She grows stronger,_ the Dark counseled in his ear. _Destroy her now, and nothing will stand in Our way. Supreme Leader…_

Again, he defied the Darkness. Again, he paid in pain and blood.

Suddenly, he was in the forest again. But this time, it was achingly, immutably green. Trees so ancient their roots sprawled boundlessly hid the sky behind their bloated bodies and dense, lush leaves. A pregnant silence blanketed the moss, swallowing the sound of his footsteps so that the drum of his heart was deafening. He wove through the fertile undergrowth, letting it brush his cowl and surcoat with intimate whispers, following his breath, led by a spun thread of sunlight to a place he knew by heart.

_Takadono._

The first time he saw her.

She was standing in the clearing, not in her slave’s clothes or her handmade wrappings, but in the dress she wore in the elevator the day she asked him to show her his power. As red as the living magma on Mustafar. As red as the setting sun.

Her beauty was shocking against the forest.

She turned and looked at him. The jewels in her headdress chimed like the music box, their sound seeming to strike something inside him and rebound, so that his whole body vibrated with some delicate, arresting emotion. His heart beat out of time with itself.

He was dying and being born again, endlessly.

“Breathe,” she reminded him.

He did. Without his mask, the sharp, sweet air burned his lungs. He tasted soil and life, things living and growing.

_Everything I am not._

“Rey-”

She shook her head. The tinkling of her crystals rung throughout the forest. “Don’t speak.”

“You have to keep running.” He took a step forward through the moss, “You have to leave the Galaxy. Get as far away from me as you can-”

“I said don’t speak,” she whispered. Suddenly, she was there, directly beneath him, swaying into him. Her hand on his chest, over his heart.

With the other, she crooked her little finger, bidding him closer.

As if drawn by a gentle hand pressing downward, he bent slowly, surely, until their foreheads met in a barely-touch.

Her hand not on his heart touched his face, his neck. She pressed a soft kiss to his lips.

His tears fell onto her cheeks like holy water sprinkled across a newborn babe.

“I’ll destroy you,” his deep rumble warbled and shook.

“Shhh.” She pressed more warm, sweet kisses on his trembling mouth.

He thought of his baby, lying tender and unknowing inside her. His throat cinched, hard and dry, as his hands took her face between them.

He wept.

“Beloved, listen to me. You have to go-”

“I am going.” She closed her eyes, their foreheads still pressed together, and smiled. “I’m going home.”

“You can’t.” He tried to swallow, and could not. “I’m a monster-”

“Yes.” Her eyes opened. She was still smiling. “You are. My monster.”

Unable to bear it, he gathered her up off the ground and held her. His heart shook with the fear of a universe without her.

“Silly Sith,” her fingertips brushed the tears off his cheeks and tenderly from his lashes.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, as sorrow wrenched his brand.

“I know you are. We’re going to fix it,” her finger traced his scar. She looked into his eyes. “Together. I promise.”

She kissed him, long and slow and deep.

The press of her small mouth to his was like absolution. He tasted her sweat and fine grit and his own cold, wet salt. They kissed until time unraveled and fell away, until the sun set and the moon made its arc through the night sky, and the sun rose again.

She kissed him for eternity, and for not long enough.

When it was over, their lips would hardly part.

“Come and take me home,” she said.

 

 

He woke alone on the floor of his apartment.

“Your Majesty-”

The General’s shouts, like his bootfalls, were storming up the hall. “Your Majesty! We’ve found her!”

It was the fortieth day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> : )


	34. And I Told You To Be Patient, And I Told You To Be Fine, And I Told You To Be Balanced, And I Told You To Be Kind, And In The Morning I'll Be With You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, I lost *everybody* on that last chapter. Let's bring it back in, and take a moment to pause and reflect on what this story is truly, at its heart, all about.
> 
> Porn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, Inspo, for another crisis averted. *salutes you*
> 
> For those of you who may be wondering, the size difference between Kylo and Rey is comparable to that of Thanos and Gamora. I don't know why you might need that reference... :>

“Our satellites picked up a distress signal in the Western Reaches of the Inner Rim,” the General spoke in rapid-fire as he rushed to keep up with Ren, who was striding quickly as he dressed. “The signature matches that of the search drone she commandeered. We sent the microscanners, and they confirmed her microwave signature is inside the Jakkuvian system-”

“She’s on Jakku?” Ren took another corner at a brisk clip as he dragged his surcoat down his bare chest and abdomen.

“It appears so.”

He reached right for his cowl from the Captain marching alongside him, “Why the Force would she go to Jakku? There’s nothing there but- _Ah._ Of course.”

The Great Dark examined its claws, smiling.

“Of course what, sir?”

Ren glanced back as they rounded on the bridge to the main hanger. A wry smirk twisted his scar. “She’s waiting for her family.”

“Her… family, sir?”

 _At last_ , hummed the Darkness, _the blind Sith sees._

Hope flared inside of him, a single spark of light against the starless night. The Siths danced around it in revel, leaping and clapping their claws over their cawing mouths. The Darkness sluiced below his skin.

_We will not fail her this time._

“No,” he wrenched his cowl and bore down on the open hanger ahead. “We will not.”

The General scrabbled to keep up, “I beg your pardon-”

Ren swung around, loping backwards down the bridge as he asked, “Is my ship ready?”

“It is.” The Captain slapped a pair of black leather gloves into his outstretched hand. Her tone was openly exasperated through her helmet, “My Lord, at the risk of sounding _pessimistic_ , I am obligated to warn you that you are most likely rushing headlong into an ambush-”

He nodded, fingers of his right hand flexing as he worked on his glove. “Most likely, yes.”

“Therefore it is my adamant request, as both your commander and chief counsel, that I accompany you-”

“Request denied.” He stopped at the railing next to the service lift that went several hundred feet to the deck below. His heart thundered. He fought the nervous roiling in his gut as he drew himself to his full height. “How do I look?”

“Glorious,” she snapped, as if that was absurdly obvious and entirely beside the point, as the General answered crisply, “Positively grotesque.”

He snorted. “Mask.”

The Captain shot it to him.

“I hope she blasts you to smithereens,” she spat.

“No you don’t.” He fitted the apparatus over his head. His heart thundered, adrenaline crackled in the tips of his fingers. He waited for the locking mechanism engage and nodded at the General. “Huxy. Wish me luck.”

The General snapped into a smart salute. “Godspeed, sir.” His mouth ticked suspiciously. “Perhaps upon your return, we can resume the business of running an empire?”

Ren’s smirk sieved through his mask. “We’ll see.”

He turned and leapt over the railing.

His landing boomed throughout the hanger. Back on the bridge, he heard the General ask, “Is that necessary?” and the Captain’s tacit reply, “Fucking Siths.”

His imperial lite-craft was idling in the Launch Bay One. He pounded forward, heart thrashing against his ribs like it was going to get free. He was so close now-

Something wrenched at his gut. He glanced right, through his visor, and caught a familiar outline beneath pale tarp. The strange tug intensified.

He stopped and turned fully towards the _Millennium Falcon_.

The Siths inside him snapped and growled, but the Great Dark only chucked at the black irony.

“Supreme Leader?” The General Hux called down from the bridge. Beside him, the Captain was shaking her helmet, _Hopeless_. “Is there a problem, sir?”

Ren’s gut lurched again. He took one last long look at his lite-craft before heading for the _Falcon._

The ancient hauler’s interior was exactly as he remembered: filthy, battered, obsolete.

Warm.

As if stepping over a grave, he hedged around the hatch where his father had spent countless hours submerged in wiring and pipes, tinkering and drinking and talking nonsense with him. Each of the recessed bunks were made up except for one near the bottom. It drew him closer, he pulled back the thermal blanket to find a rose, withered but still achingly beautiful, tucked like a sleeping child amongst his memories.

 _What sweet games she plays,_ purred the Great Dark. Its slick, black tongue followed the curve of its maw. _Our dearest little one._

He faced the cockpit.

The copilot’s seat had its back to him, but the captain’s chair stared out at him across the hull. Worn deep into its leather was the imprint of his father. Crossing quietly, his glove ghosted over the groove before he sank into the seat.

“Alright,” he said.

There were three monitors and at least a hundred different options on and above the control board. He found the one he thought was for the main engine and flipped it to _On._

Nothing happened.

After another quick pass, he opened the fuel pump and gunned the boosters. Their turbines gurgled and sputtered.

His fist slammed the dash. “Son of a fucking porge-whore-”

“Whoa hey easy there, partner. You kiss your mother with that mouth?” From the copilot’s seat, Han Solo reached over and closed the fuel pump. His face was young and smooth, his chest perfectly whole. “You’re flooding the engine. Come on, Benny-boy. What’d I show yah?”

Ren scanned the board and thought.

“Auxiliary thrusters.” He flipped the row of four red switches. His boosters engaged, and the _Falcon_ began to judder.

“Atta boy, _now_ turn on your fuel pump-”

Ren felt that familiar, weightless jolt in the pit of his stomach as the ship wavered up into a hover.

He tapped the coordinates for the Jakkuvian system into the ship’s navigation protocol as his father kicked back with his fingers laced behind his head. “Not bad, eh? Don’t say your old man never taught you nothin’.”

With his location set, the entire dash flittered and flared to life, a hundred different lights blinking out of time with each other like a kaleidoscope of multi-colored stars. “Thanks.”

“Anytime, son. Any old time.”

Wicking sweat and salt off his lip, Ren flipped the pressure gauge and closed his massive grip around the main launch. He looked through the view shield.

Beyond the hanger, the world was lightening.

His heart thundered.

He punched it.

 

 

 

 

She woke all at once.

Outside, the night was perfectly still, but within her naked belly, her baby rioted, kicking and paddling itself so wildly she felt as if it had brushed every corner of her womb.

Her heart leapt into a race. She sat up and cupped her growing roundness.

“Whassa matter, lovie,” she croaked. Worry niggled in her throat as her baby flipped and turned. “You want some water? Or a nibble, maybe?”

Moving carefully, she dragged on her boots and stepped out into the sultry twilight.

High above her, the star-studded night had softened. It arced, straining to touch horizon behind her, where the orange light of dawn was ombring to blue-velvet dark.

She bent over and scooped warm water from the small metal barrel she kept outside her hut, listening to the satellite she’d built glide peacefully though its ellipses.

_Still no sign._

She sighed. The water she’d splashed dribbled down her chin onto her bare breasts. She fanned her hands to cool her skin as the sweet darkness within her continued its frenzied swimming.

“What’s gotten into you, silly bean?” She glanced up into the fading night. What she saw made the smile slip off her face. She squinted and strained up onto her toes.

One by one, all the stars were going out.

She turned back to the east. The sun was still edging steadily over the horizon to kiss the receding dark. A cool breeze, the first she’d ever felt on Jakku, swept like an icy sigh over the dunes and enveloped her as the sky ahead turned to pitch.

Her baby danced.

Against the perfect dark, a long, thin line of silver streaked through the sky. It grew bigger and brighter with each pounding rabbit-beat of her heart.

A ship.

She glanced at the satellite, still rotating benignly.

It wasn’t imperial.

_Was it really-_

The light pierced her atmosphere in a glorious blaze of burnt ozone. The craft barreled for the surface then leveled off, kicking up a cyclone of sand and exhaust as it landed steadily a single klick from her camp. Even in the pale, predawn light, she could see it.

The _Falcon._

She shrieked and leapt.

 

 

 

Before the ramp could descend fully, he was already pounding down it, ducking to avoid the hull as he leapt down into the sand.

He turned in every direction. His heart slammed savagely at its cage, he tried to swallow his adrenaline, to take control of his emotions, but-

“Kylo!”

He heard her shriek his name.

He turned east, into the rising sun, and saw a small figure sprinting towards him down the blue-shadowed dunes. Her top bun bobbled wildly, and except for her tawny hide boots, she was naked as the day she was born.

His wife.

He kicked off, putting everything into a long canter that swallowed the desert below. His cowl streamed out behind him, he threw forward and pumped his arms as his shout sieved distorted through his mask. “ _Don’t run_!”

He waved his arms above his head. “Stop running, you’re pregnant!”

“I love you!” she shouted back at him from the top of her lungs. Her legs peddled faster, kicking back clouds of sand.

“I love you too! Don’t- ughr Goddamnit!” he reached up for the locking mechanism on his mask, dragging it up and off and throwing it away before the apparatus had fully disengaged. His hair lifted and shuffled in the cold, fast-sweeping bands that whipped over the desert. The air burned his lungs. Gasping, he pressed even harder into his sprint, blinded by the brilliant light of the sun cresting the over horizon. “Rey! Stopping running!”

“What?” the wind carried her voice past him, sheer music to his ears.

He was closing in on her fast, and she was racing to meet him.

One hundred, fifty, twenty feet-

He slid home on his knees in a crescendo of sand and billowing cowl.

She slammed into him, a warm, wriggling, sweat-slick flurry of furious kisses and two-fisted grips in his hair. She kissed him everywhere on his face she could find, hot, open-mouthed kisses with her little pink tongue painting haphazard shapes across his skin as he tried to catch her mouth.

“Kylo,” she said, over and over between kisses. She wrung his mane, “Kylo, Kylo-”

“Rey.” Nothing, nothing but this mattered, her ribcage between his two hands, her lips catching on every angle in his face, his tongue deep inside her-

“I love you,” she gasped inside his mouth, arms wrapping and rewrapping all the way around his neck. Their noses bumped, faces so close he couldn’t look into both of her eyes at the same time. “Oh my God I love you, Kylo I love you-”

“I love you, baby,” he kissed her as his heart clambered up through his chest to hold her. He enveloped her completely, savoring her smallness, her warmth, her perfect nakedness. His eyes shut against the ache. “I love you. You are everything, everything. And all of it-”

She cut him off with a kiss, her tongue reaching for his throat as she tried to drag his cowl over his head at the same time.

He stood, taking her with him. Her boots dangled as he lifted her higher and higher still, until their lips parted, she was so high above him. Her hands held onto his shoulders, she laughed and shrieked for joy.

Dawn broke behind her.

 

 

“Hurry,” she whined between wet, sensual kisses that took the breath right out of his lungs. Somewhere during his stumbling, stuttering climb up the ramp, she’d wrenched off his cowl and was scrambling at the shoulders of his surcoat. The points of her sand-crusted knees dug below his ribs as she tried over and over to wrap her small legs around his waist. His hands held firmly onto the globes of her ass, one glove on, the other lost.

“Kylo!”

Her tongue was inside his mouth again before he could answer, _Hold on._ He lurched by blind memory towards the bunks nested into the wall, hiking her higher up his body as he went, her teeth taking his bottom lip with them as he bolstered her weight under one arm and groped out with the other. His heart tripped and raced, so much blood pounded through him he thought he’d burst open. His fist found purchase on a pallet, he ripped it from the wall and threw it down onto the corrugated durasteel.

His wife refused to let go of him, even after he buckled to his knees so she could set her feet flat on the floor. Her fingers knotted in his hair and her thighs clamped his abdomen, calves scissoring around his hips as she held on with all her strength.

“I can’t-” he tried to tell her between violent, lasting kisses, “take off my- tunic if you don’t- _Rey!_ ”

His arm shot out to catch himself as she toppled him. She fell sideways across the cot, with what little slack she could find in his surcoat still clenched in her fists. Her top bun was loose and flapping, the middle and bottom had come completely undone. Long, sandy strands trailed over her shoulders and along the cot, flyaways clung to the sweat and tears on her face. Her cheeks were flushed, lips swollen, tongue peeking between them as she panted and showed him all her teeth.

“Now, I want it,” her small breasts rose and fell with her rapid, staccato breathing. She drew up her knees, the heels of her boots separating as she parted her thighs, baring her little rounded belly and her soft, wet sex as a sweet offering. Her entire body trembled.

His heart stopped. He groaned her name and dipped his head to nuzzle her, mouth open, trying to take in all of her warm, salty, sun-speckled skin at once.

“Oh _fuck_ -” her back arched, hands twisting in his hair as he drew one whole breast into his mouth and suckled. “Kylo!”

He was sloppy, artless and completely self-indulgent as he painted her breasts and belly and the insides of her quaking thighs with his long, cold tongue, chasing the warmth hidden in her valleys and creases, working himself lower, where the scent of her arousal was overwhelming and she was hotter than the sun.

At the first lap of her little sex, she bucked and shuddered.

He would have told her she was beautiful, except his lungs were collapsing like a dying star. He folded his arms beneath her and grasped her by the shoulders, lifting and holding her to his mouth as his tongue reached into the deepest, most sacred part of her. She keened and juddered, riding his wet, cool touch, grinding out her pleasure as he drank from her ocean in gasping, greedy mouthfuls.

“In,” she was pleading, pulling on his hair from the root. “I need it in, Kylo, _hurry-_ ”

He sat back on his haunches just long enough to bunch and rip his surcoat over his head, making his mussed mane stand on-end. He caught the tips of his right glove in his teeth, snarling, and tore it off. He spat it in the direction of cockpit before falling back over her onto his forearms hard enough to make the interior rattle.

Rather than terrify her, his terrible size and darkened, mottled skin made her frenzy. She stopped rubbing herself where her hands had cupped her sex and reached for him, straining to touch him everywhere she could reach.

“You’re so beautiful,” she breathed.

His breath snared on his heart as he touched a naked, trembling fingertip to her opening. Her eyes closed as he pressed into her.

She was beautifully, impossibly, unbearably tight.

Working her sex with a single finger, he covered her with more and more kisses, her body ebbing and surging beneath him with her harsh breath while he savored her taste and texture and smell. His arm slipped beneath her, angling her hips to accept another digit as his mouth found her ear.

“Don’t ever leave me again, Rey,” he fucked her faster, listening to the slick, submissive sounds of her sex and her low, pitched moans. “You leave me again and I swear to Darkness, I will destroy all of it-”

“Yes,” her eyes pinched tight, she tipped her head back and clenched around him. Her belly began to shake. “Yes, yes-”

As he dipped to suckle at her throat, his hand under her hips gripped and lifted her thigh.

She gushed and whimpered, holding absolutely, perfectly still as he fucked her to pleasure. With the first whip-snap of her orgasm, he added a third finger. She wailed and arched at the stretch.

He held her open, watching her take him down to the knuckle, whispering into her ear between kisses on her neck and on her breast and on her shoulder. How beautiful she was, how he’d tear down the Galaxy for her, how much he loved her.

“Okay okay okay-” she gripped and held his forearm. Her other hand laid on his cheek, like she didn’t know whether to push him off her or pull him closer. Her belly creased where she folded, shoulders lifting off the short pallet. A sheen of sweat covered her skin so thickly it beaded and rolled off of her. Her sex squelched softly around his fingers, he was wet up to his wrist with her slick. She quaked so hard her breath skipped and her teeth chattered. “Okay, please-”

He kept her thighs apart and curled his fingers inside her.

“Come on, baby, one more,” he panted.

Her lashes flickered at his cold breath in her ear. He caught her head tipping back against his shoulder and kissed her temple, her open mouth.

She looked up into his eyes. “Kylo-”

“I’m here, Rey,” he told her, “I’m right here, beloved. Close your eyes.”

Her body bowed and tightened, her breath quickened to a stop. She came keening, her hand on his face pressing mindlessly over his mouth. He kissed her palm, her fingers and the soft spaces between them as slowly she climbed down from the stars. His fingers inside her slowed and spread apart, he stretched her as much as he dared.

When he thought she was ready, he laid her down on the cot.

She panted up at him, her fingertips trembling along his features as his hands worked unsteadily at his belt. Thumbs hooked into the waist of his leggings, he hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” her voice sounded so young. He glanced at her, a child spread out like a lamb for slaughter beneath his might, and his chest tightened, his throat sealed shut.

“Kylo?”

He sat back on his haunches. He shook his head. “I don’t think I-”

“Hey.” Propping up on her elbow, she reached out and coaxed him with her fingers. Her teeth still chattered softly from her orgasm. “Come here.”

“No, that’s enough,” he tried to sound sure, soothing, but it came out cracked and rough. “You need to rest-”

“Please?” her lashes fluttered. She tugged at his arm. “Just come here...”

He laid down over her, shored up by his forearms that framed her shoulders. He took her face between his hands.

Force help him, she was so, so beautiful.

He kissed her, the want of her pouring through him and gathering hard and heavy inside his groin. Her scent surrounded him, he could taste her on his lips and on her skin. He felt drunk and disoriented, desperate from the lack of her, desperate not to harm her. If he hurt her, if he drove her away again-

“Shhh,” she was in his mind, strumming softly along his thoughts. Her lips pressed tender kisses to the corners of his frown. From tip to tail, her fingertips stroked his scar. “Just be sweet to me.”

He looked deep into her eyes for any sign of uncertainty. But there was only love.

His mouth warbled, his throat was too thick to speak. He laid his forehead against hers.

“Silly Sith,” she gave him a small, secret smile, “I love you when you’re sweet. Don’t you know that already?”

“I do,” he gruffed, nodding. “I love you. So much, so much-”

Her smile widened, breath warm and sweet on his lips as she reached. “Believe me, I know-”

He held still and waited as she rolled his leggings down over his hips. His cock was as hard as durasteel, it strained over the waistband and landed with a dull, solid smack against her sex.

She looked down between them. Her eyebrows reached for the sky. “Holy kriff…”

It wept along on her soft, downy mound. He tried not to compare its size to her thigh beside it as his Darkness whispered black desires into his heart.

“Well, you really are the Last Great Sith,” she reached between her thighs to touch him. Her fingers were perfectly, unbearably hot.

He moaned, tucking his nose into the crook of her neck and shuddering as she gripped what she could fit in her hand. “Rey-”

“Yeah that’s- that’s definitely bigger than I remembered,” her breath buffeted his shoulder in quick, excited puffs. “Do you- can you put it in me now? Like right now?”

“ _Fuck_.”

“Kylo-”

“Alright, okay,” he leaned up and spat generously into his hand. His voice sound strangled and dark, even to him. “Hold yourself open.”

“Like this?” she panted, reaching under her thighs to peel her small, pink folds apart.

He stopped, spit-slick cock in hand, to stare dumbly for a full heartbeat.

“Uh, no-” Gripping the backs of her knees, he pressed her legs forward, rocking her hips off the cot until she was nearly folded in half. “Like _that_.”

“Oh,” she breathed weakly, wrapping her arms around her trembling thighs. Slick dribbled from her slit onto the pallet.

Adrenaline lashed his spine and cracked across his gut.

“Oh God, okay,” he rasped. He mounted her carefully, bracing on his hand outside her waist as he positioned himself at her sex.

The first hard slip of his cockhead against her lips had his horizon tilting sideways. “Mother fucker-”

The flat of her feet pressed against his chest, she had completely forgotten about holding herself open and was reaching her hands up over her head to grip the cot. On her next exhale, her stomach shallowed out. “Okay, go. Go go go-”

Slowly, steadily, he pushed.

Her entrance contracted, trying to resist the stretch. He pressed harder, and the tight ring of muscles gave around him. He watched himself, riveted as he parted her.

She mewled, “Oh my God…”

The pressure was agonizing and glorious. He shut his eyes, letting his Darkness paint a hundred violent, feral scenes on the backs of his eyelids as he edged into her by millimeters. The universe was burning, on fire around and inside of him, as he sank further into his own destruction.

Beneath him, she was whimpering, loud, prey-like sounds that when he focused on them made his blood rush and his heart beat faster. Her body worked to draw him deeper as he pressed her apart with slow, constant pressure until at last, his crown kissed her womb.

Her Light let out a soft, feminine sigh as, all around them, the Darkness looped its great black coils.

“I love you,” he gasped, shuddering as he began to rock inside her, hardly withdrawing, not knowing or caring how much of him she had taken. None of it mattered, now that he was finally home. “Oh fuck baby, I love you.”

She framed his face in her hands, shaking. The Galaxy shook with her. “I love you, I love you so much-”

They kissed and kissed and kissed more, until their tongues touched openly between them mouths, until his lungs burned from not breathing. When he laid his hand on her belly, he could feel himself move inside her.

“I’m coming,” he gasped.

“Come in me, come in me Kylo-” she whimpered into his mouth. She stroked his chest, his shoulders, the lines in his abdomen. “I want it, I want you, all of you, all your babies, you’re so beautiful, I love you, come in me-”

His world stacked and collided with hers as he convulsed. Then everything went beautifully, peacefully white.

 

 

 

“God I missed you,” his throat worked. He spoke in hushed, reverent tones. “I thought about you every single day. I thought I’d never see you. Every second you were gone, I missed you.”

Slowly, he dotted cold, tender kisses across her belly. The soft lights in the seams of the ship’s paneling were low enough he could still see without his mask. It washed the fullness of her body, surrounded in blankets and his own dark cowl, a beautiful pale gold. “I love you so much. You have no idea, how much I love you.”

“The baby loves that, when you speak to it like that,” she whispered. Her fingers carded softly through his damp, mussed hair. “I can feel it dancing around like mad. Can you?”

She drew his hand to a spot just below her navel and pressed it with hers. “Baby says, _Hullo Papa. Nice to be with you again. Got bigger, didn’t I? Hullo-hullo, hiya Papa_.”

Love, boundless and aching, unfurled in his chest as tears dripped from his lashes. They rolled in each direction over the roundness of her belly, drawing long, irregular lines down to the cot below. Closing his eyes, he nuzzled at the smooth slope of her womb and listened to his baby patter and spin.

 _How sweet,_ the Dark smiled. It was wholly, frighteningly tender. _She knows her sire._

“She?”

He looked up, over the rise of her belly, between her small, rose-tipped breasts, at his beautiful wife.

She beamed.

“She- is it- is she really? Can you really tell?” she brushed tears off of her own speckled, sunburned cheeks. Her fingers stroked her belly. “Of course she is, how didn’t I know that? Now you say it, it makes all the sense. How brilliant. How spectactical. How absolutely marvelousable-”

He rose over her, savoring the kiss she stretched up to give him, full and sensual, as he gathered her against him and settled them in the nest of bedding he’d made.

She turned into him, burrowing deeper into his coldness.

He held the universe within his arms.

“Kylo?” her voice was infinitely soft. She yawned.

He looked down at her crown of soft brown hair. Could a person really be this happy? “Yes, my darling?”

“If I ask you for somethin’-” she yawned again, “will you give it to me?”

He snorted.

_Always a catch._

A tender smirk twisted his scar. “Isn’t that how it works?”

Her lips smiled over his heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey you. How you doin'? Thanks for hanging with me for so long. We have just one chapter left to go. I have to tell you, I'm excited, and a little sad, too. I'm going to miss this, and you, and all of it.
> 
> Anyway, I'd really love to hear from you, if you've got a mo'. It fills my cup : )


	35. She Asked, What Have I Learned Since Gettin' Richer? I Learned Workin' With The Negatives Can Make For Better Pictures. I Learned Hennessey And Enemies Is One Hell Of A Mixture. And Though It's Still Fucked Up Girl, I'm Still Fuckin' Wittcha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work is dedicated to my husband. You saved my violent, feral heart, and showed me what this life is for.
> 
> And to Veronica.

 

 Thirty Years Later

 

 

On the third landing above the great foyer, at the stone banister inside the darkest of the shadows, Kylo Ren watched two hundred media teams angle camera drones and sound equipment around the foot of his titanic four-story staircase. The Supreme Leader was giving her annual address from their family home on Mustafar, and every colony inside the Universal Commonwealth had submitted its elite media teams to a lottery drawing for the honor of covering Her Majesty’s speech.

Gratefully, he would not be expected to speak. As one of the many perks of his abdication, he only had to loom beside and slightly behind her, ominous and sinister, like the great black shadow of Death. Kylo Ren, Sith Lord, High Commander of Her Majesties Imperial Army, husband and consort to the Supreme Leader, sire of her successors.

Could his career be any sweeter?

Smirking, he turned away from the swarm and din in the foyer, to the line of holographic portraits hovering in recessed spaces along the walls. In each one, he was kneeling dark and massive, in full raiment, beside his beloved on her throne.

And in every one of them, they were surrounded by children.

Directly behind him, the portrait that loomed silvery and life-sized depicted their family as it was twenty years ago. Two small girls, dark haired and sharp-featured, posed side-by-side on his left. His firstborn, Sybari, had one hand on his shoulder, and with the other held her sister's, Rancora. Seated on the floor in front of him, in outfits coordinated by their mother, were his twins, Animus and Discord. The boy Animus's soft, round face was benignly sullen, the exact opposite of his sister’s sharp eyes and malicious little smirk. Their next child, Maleficence, a beautiful little night flower, sat tucked up on Ren's knee. The last, a newborn baby Malice, who was his mother personified down to the Light in his small golden eyes, snoozed safe and swaddled inside her arms.

Six children, four glorious daughters, the full fruit of his Darkness; one fragile, special child who remained untouched by the Force; and the smallest a Light-sider, with speckled cheeks and easy smiles.

Precious to him, every single one.

His eyes traced each of their faces with rabid tenderness, swamped by a barrage of sweet memories more beautiful and numerous than the stars.

Suddenly, his breath caught, snaring on the damp disease that now coated his lungs. He gasped, sputtering, and spat out what choked him into his glove.

Blood, thick and blacker than his leather, splattered his palm.

 _Soon,_ said the Dark.

He coughed, fighting for breath as he shook his head. “No. They’re not ready…”

_I am not ready._

The Darkness mused, _We never are._

Further down the hall, towards the top of the staircase, he heard a clipped, metallic voice say, “Good maker, is that them?”

Quickly, he wiped his eyes and then his mouth. His glove, wet with tar, trembled. He hid it inside his cowl. “Captain.”

Her boots stepped soundless over the dark marble as she came to stand by his side. Her chrome armor gleamed silver in what grey light sifted through the tint in the deep-set windows above the main hall. Though her helmet obscured her face, beneath it, her monstrous visage remained untouched by time. A byproduct of her covenant, through him, with the Darkness.

When It finally called him to the cold, empty ether, she would follow.

Leering over the railing, she observed, “It’s an absolute circus."  

“Mm. She says it _comforts the colonies to know their conquerors_. Hux agrees, of course.” He rolled his eyes.

_Administrators._

“Don’t tell me she’s traipsing you out of front of these,” she waved over the gathering crowd, “ _paparazzi_.”

A feral affection touched the corners of his mouth. He made a mocking gesture. “I live to serve.”

She snorted.

Below, a service drone rolled in two large recorders on tripods. It was flanked by senior members of Ren's own elite guard. Even more finely-honed troopers lined the perimeter.

“Such a waste of resources,” she clucked.

He watched a technician squabble with its droid over lenses. “I couldn’t agree more.”

“How many languages will it be cast in?” she asked.

His chin angled as he guessed, “Five, ten thousand? It’s the _annual homecoming address-_ ” they exchanged meaningful looks through her visor, “Hux will have it broadcasted across the Commonwealth next cycle.”

“Such a waste,” she repeated.

He thought about his wife, flittering around their rooms this morning, practicing her address below her breath as she stepped over dollies and drawings and model starships. Her endless days of meetings, the General never far from her, the two of them working tirelessly in tandem to bring order and prosperity to the worlds he seized.

Their great compromise: her love, in exchange for his dominion.

A sweeter deal for him, he was sure.

Darkness, cold-burning and sharp, crept along his veins as he told her, “Better them than us.”

“Sir?”

He gestured in the space between them. “We’re not rulers-”

A malevolent sneer twisted his scar.

“We’re conquerors.”

An answering animus curled through her aura like a smile.

“Yes. Yes we are.”

 

 

 

“High Commander Ren.” The General met him at one of the many doorways in the South Hall.

Time had touched him graciously, adding lines around his eyes and on his forehead that only enhanced his handsome, angular features. Streaks of winter made his crop of shockingly red hair more muted and distinguished. He saluted smartly to Ren.

“Her Majesty is ready for you, sir.”

Behind him, sharp shrieks and cackles were pouring from the room.

“Bit of a firefight in there,” he added wryly. Ren noticed a jellied handprint on his lapel when it caught the light.

“ _Grandpapa_ not doing it for them?” Ren didn’t bother to hide his smugness.

It had been an extreme point of contention between the two of them when the General’s only son, Armitage Bastille Hux the fourth, ran away with Ren’s third daughter, Discord. Both patriarchs were furious at the elopement, then offended by the other’s fury. Now, they competed viciously for the affection of their two shared grandchildren.

Ren was confident he was winning by an avalanche.

“I’ll take it from here,” he condescended with a smirk.

As if by cue, a darkly dressed imp dashed around the General and hurtled himself full-force at Ren’s shins.

“Momo!”

From within the room, a black cacophony of whoops and shouts erupted.

“Momo! Momo Momo Momo!”

The General rolled his eyes, “Panderer,” and clicked off down the hall with a huff.

“Momo, you’re here!” The tiny Sith at his feet wrung his ankles and pulled his surcoat. “Do you have any biscuits? Please can I have one? Mimi says I’ve been good.”

“No, Mimi does not say that,” came Rey’s voice. “No fibbin’ to Momo.”

Folding over, Ren pinched his assailant by the scruff of his cowl, a miniature replica of Ren’s own, and drew him up until they were eyelevel. “Well, well. What do we have here? A rabid little cur, perhaps?”

He kissed the boy, his fifth grandchild, directly on his crumb-crusted mouth.

Immediately, the child took Ren’s face between his hands. His neat crop of ginger hair flopped down into his cool blue eyes. He glowed with love for his grandsire. “Momo can I go in your Fighter? Please Momo please please please? I promise I’ll destroy a thousand Jedi-”

“Ha! You couldn’t kill a Jedi if he threw himself in front of your light saber, _Atticus,_ ” the taunt was lobbed from Ren’s third grandchild, Sybari's daughter, who sat with her baby sister at the foot of Rey’s dressing riser.

“Could so!” screeched her cousin, now nested against Ren’s hip. He hid his face in Ren’s cowl.

Ren hitched him higher and kissed his hair. “Of course you could, Atti.”

“Yeah, Livie, you’re just jealous because _you_ don’t have any Darkshear,” sneered another little girl from Rey’s vanity. Crimson-colored lipstick was drawn in a generous oval around her mouth. Her grandmother’s ruby headpiece wobbled on top of her bun.

She sniffed. “You’re probably a Light-sider.”

“I am not, Sydni!” shrieked Olivia, sharply enough to shatter glass. She turned the same shade as her grandmother’s lipstick. “Take it back!”

The babe began to wail.

“Alright, dovies,” Rey chided tiredly.

She stood at the eye of the storm on her riser, inside a semicircle of mirrors. The train of her dark, full gown trailed towards him. Her hair, grown down past her waist, had been styled into the high, elegant chignon of Aalderaanian matrons. She wore his insignia on her left breast.

Time had only made her more beautiful.

He watched her face, tipped down to read the holopad in her hands, from every angle. Her long, dark lashes curved softly against her cheeks, her lips moving sweetly while she tried painstakingly to practice her lines, “- a family, like yours, living together in a hope for a bright future-”

Love, deep and rankling, unfurled inside his chest.

“Mo-mo-oh-oh,” the baby’s pitiful sobs broke his reverie. Her tiny hands reached for him, a seedling straining towards its black sun.

 _See?_ smiled the Dark. It showed all its gleaming teeth. _We are immortal._

Ren set down Atticus, the boy’s small feet already peddling before they touched the carpet. He wormed from Ren’s grasp and rushed headlong to snatch his sister’s crown from her head.

Sydni screeched, “Mimi!”

“Ah-ah, Atti,” Rey scolded, as Ren stooped to gather the smallest of his grandchildren. “Do you want Mimi to eat your cake at dinnertime? Because I will if you can’t be sweet to your sister.”

“Yes, Atti,” Olivia mocked her grandmother’s accent, “Be sweet to Sydni or Mimi and I shall eat all your cake.”

“Chut up!” barked Atticus.

“No, you shut up!”

“Make me!”

“Mimi I want my crown!”

At the end of her tether, Rey looked over her shoulder and whined, “Ky-lo.”

But he was lost in the face of his granddaughter, her fat cheeks and long lashes sparkling with forgotten tears as she flirted with him, gumming her words and patting and pinching his nose. “Moh-moh-moh-moh.”

“What, my dark?” he whispered between kissing the tears off her cheeks. He nuzzled the end of his beak against her tiny nose. “What’s the matter, hm? What does my baby want?”

She smiled, a sweet circular grin, and dragged his face to kiss her grandsire. Her spit was cool and wet on his mouth.

“One more year,” he whispered, looking into her beautiful brown eyes.

_We shall see…_

The rest of his little imps gathered in revel around him, hopping and leaping and tugging his cowl as they simpered and chirped, “Momo can we go flying? I want to hold your saber, Momo! Momo pick me up, pick me up!”

“I don’t know, Momo,” Rey clucked from her riser. “All morning, they’ve been awful little snakes-”

The children beamed at her praise.

She folded her arms. “I think we should pitch them into the lake.”

“Yes!” hissed the boy, pumping his fist in the air, as the girls wrung Ren’s cowl and screamed, “No Momo, don’t let her!”

Ren had the bite the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing. “Listen up, darklings. Mimi has a meeting-”

“What kind of meeting?” Olivia piped.

“Can I come?” asked Atticus.

“Baba-momo,” said the baby.

“A very important one and no, you may not.”

Three small Sith-faces fell. “Aw, Mo-mooooh. That’s not fair-”

“Ah-ah, Momo doesn’t want to hear it. I want all of you, in the nursery, playing with your toys, _nicely._ No shoving, no stabbing. Sydni, I am speaking to you,” he pinned his other ginger grandchild with a pointed look.

She ignored him, haughtily smoothing her bun. She had lipstick smeared to her ears.

The oldest, Olivia, reached up sullenly for her baby sister.

“C’mon Jilly," she pouted, "Momo says we have to go.”

His lips twitched. “When Mimi’s meeting is finished, Momo will take you all flying.”

There were yips and leaps of revel all the way into the hall. Atticus danced in circles and whooped while pounding his mouth.

“Moh-moh-moh,” the baby babbled back at Ren as she bobbled away astride her sister’s cocked hip.

He sent her a noisy kiss.

“Heavens to Light,” Rey let her head drop back, earrings dancing above her shoulders. She looked thoroughly harassed. “They’ve been like that all mornin’, completely full-blast.” She shook her head. “S’last time I give them chocolate pudding for breakfast, I can promise you that.”

He tucked his thumbs into his sword belt, watching her chase a tiny toy ewok out of her bustle with a frown. A wave of savage tenderness washed over him, momentarily drowning out the thrum of the Darkness behind his eyes.

“Beloved,” he called her quietly.

She looked up. “What?”

Surrounded by opulent excess, she stood like a precious pearl in the palm of his hand, bright and luminous and small. How he longed to close his fist and hold her forever.

There was not enough time.

“Kylo?” her eyes shone soft worry. “Are you alright?”

“You are-” he paused to trace her face, gently lined by decades of brilliant smiles, down the soft slope of her breasts, to the fullness of her body, given to her by his children and the love he’d lavished upon her, year-after-year. His voice was thick with emotion, “Unfathomably beautiful.”

She glanced down, hiding a satisfied little smirk as she smoothed her skirt with a huff. “Oh, honestly.”

“I burn looking at you.” Slowly, he sauntered to her. “I want to make love to you, right here, right now, until all the stars go out. I want to hold you until our flesh becomes one-”

A chorus of tiny, nervous snickers erupted from around the open door.

“Momo said _make love-”_

“That means s-e-x-”

“Ew, gross!”

“Mimi doesn’t do _that_ -”

Rey pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and laughed as Ren groaned, "Menaces..."

“Shh, they can hear you-”

“Nuh-uh, I’m whispering!”

“I want cake-”

“We’re infested,” Rey bleated pitifully from her riser. She was still smiling. “Kylo, we’ll never be rid of them.”

Slowly, Ren used his Darkness to draw the door on tiny prying eyes.

“Everywhere I turn in this house,” Rey threw up her hands and let them fall back to her gown with a quiet _poof_ , “it’s Siths. Do you even remember the last time we were alone together?” Her gaze followed him as he stopped and knelt in front of her. She laid her arms on his shoulders and laced her hands behind his head. “Did that ever really happen? Or did I make that up?”

“You’re happy,” he murmured seriously, heart squeezing as he stared up into her beautiful eyes. His devotion coiled around her like a great, jealous snake as he framed her hips between his monstrous hands. “Say that you’re happy.”

“Ugh,” her nose crinkled. She plucked at his hair, making it stand up at strange angles as she whined, “Do I have to?”

He pressed upwards, so that their mouths were hardly apart. “Say it.”

“Alright, I’m happy,” she conceded. She kissed him, slow and sensual and sweet. “Very, very happy.”

“Truly?” his chest ached. He needed to hear it. To know. “Have I given you everything? Do you have everything that you wa-”

He flinched, gasping, as the Darkness suddenly twisted inside him.

The playful smile slipped off her face. Immediately, she took his face in her hands. “Kylo, what’s wrong? Is it happening again? Talk to me, say something-”

“It’s noth-”

Another violent wrench inside his guts cut him off. He wanted to curl around the pain, to beat it back with his fist. Instead, he clenched his eyes shut and strangled a snarl.

The eyes of the Siths watched him, chuckling.

“It’s nothing,” he panted, unwilling to worry her, to grunt and to growl. “I’m just a little tired-”

He groaned suddenly, low and guttural, in the back of his throat, as the pain sluiced between his ribs.

“Shh, my love. My sweetheart-” his wife gathered him up, winding her arms tightly around his neck. “My dahlingest Sith.” She laid her cheek in his hair. “You’re alright.”

He wrapped himself around her and nodded against her breast. She was so perfectly, achingly warm. “I’m alright-”

“You’re alright,” she repeated in a soothing whisper. “Those stupid med droids don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know you, they don’t know my Sith.” She pressed a wet, warbling kiss to his brow. “You’ll see, everythin’s going to be fine.”

His throat bobbed. “Yes. I just need to rest-”

“Yes, yes-” She pulled back to look at him. Her little thumb touched away the wet along his lashes. Like the tears in her eyes that threatened to fall, her smile trembled. “That’s it. That’s exactly it. You just need to rest. I know, we’ll take the children to Coruscant for the Festival of Lights. They loved it last year, don't you remember-”

“I do,” he told her, staring deeply into her eyes. “Rey, I remember everything. Every moment-”

“Then that’s it, that’s settled. It’s all settled.” She rubbed soft, manic circles into his chest. “See? Simple. You just need to rest, and everythin’ will be fine. They don't know my Sith-”

She laid their foreheads together, her sweet breath warm on his face as she closed her eyes and whispered, "They don't know you, they don't. They don't..."

She was right, they didn't know him. Not the droids, not the doctors, not even the Darkness. He wouldn’t allow himself to be taken from her, his beautiful, precious, perfect girl. He wouldn’t.

He would not.

Slowly, she unwound his cowl.

"Rey?"

Her lips trembled. "I want you... to make love to me... until the sky falls down, and all the stars go out."

She leaned in and kissed his mouth.

"Please."

He told her, “Lie down.”

 

 

 

Hours later, the General spoke briskly on the other side of her as they walked.

“There will be a holo opp at the base of the stairs,” he montioned graciously past her to Ren, “His Excellence the High Commander will be optioned in several of them with the Supreme Leader, then you, Your Majesty,” he gestured to his wife, “will be taking a smaller group on a tour of the castle and grounds. All the usual places – portrait hall, ballroom, the grand library-”

“Hm, wait what, I’m sorry?” Rey shook her head. The jewels around her neck tinkled softly. She had been letting Ren escort her quietly through the castle, her tiny hand tucked warm and pale into the cold crook of his arm, red diamond ring glinting fiercely against the black of his surcoat. Her cheeks were still pleasure-flushed.

Behind his mask, a smirk wrenched Ren’s scar. “He means the address in the foyer, beloved.”

“In the foyer, yes, yes of course,” she nodded. “Yes of course.” Gingerly, she patted the General’s arm. “You’ve thought of everything, Armitage. Thank you.”

The General inclined graciously. “It is my pleasure, Your Majesty.”

He said her title without a hint of irony.

With the grand staircase now directly ahead of them, the General stepped forward and turned. “Are we ready, then?”

Rey looked up at Ren.

Even with her hair swept elegantly high, she hardly reached his bicep. She was the pinprick of a star against the oceanic swell of his empire.

 _But oh, how she shines,_ sighed the Dark.

Too softly to sieve through his speech grate, he agreed, “Yes she does.”

“Alright.” Her jewels rose and fell with her breasts as she took a deep, steadying breath. “I’m ready.”

Behind his mask, a smile deepened the crease of his scar.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of worlds and nations,” the General heralded, “It is my great honor to present to you our beloved sovereign, the Supreme Leader of the Universal Commonwealth Rey of Jakku, escorted by her husband, High Commander of Her Majesty’s army, Lord Kylo Ren. The last, great Sith.”

At the first step, her hand squeezed his arm.

“Don’t let me fall,” she whispered.

His promise poured through his mask, “Not even a possibility.”

She smiled.

 

 

 

 

A fic by PastelWonder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So lovies, not bad for a free book, ammi right? (Jesus I hope I'm right...)
> 
> From the bottom of my heart, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed creating it. *Please* leave me a note in the comments, so that I can thank you personally for your readership and support.
> 
> And if you're busy, shy, or not inclined, let me tell you here and now - thank you for supporting my art. You are a beautiful egg, and I love you.
> 
> Subscribe to my author name and you'll never miss a new Reylo story (Go to my Dashboard, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder, and click Subscribe). To know more about me and my writing, hit me up on Tumblr (link below).
> 
> See you in the next one : )
> 
> Always, Pastel

**Author's Note:**

> Come frolic with me on Tumblr: https://royramsey.tumblr.com/
> 
> Your kudos and comments are always appreciated.


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